The Assessment of Digital Project Work in the EFL Classroom

This paper reports on a project aiming at describing professional practice in the assessment of collaborative digital projects among a group of inservice English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers within the context of a single workplace, a technologically well-resourced upper secondary school in Sweden. In a previous project (Allen & Berggren, 2016), teachers were provided with an overview of the digital literacy concept as described by Dudeney, Hockly, and Pegrum (2013) as part of an initiative to better integrate information communication technology into their classroom practice. The current study addresses the need expressed in previous projects for developing assessment practices among the teachers working with digital projects, making use of a practical overview of the assessment of digital projects (Dudeney et al., 2013) trying out an assignment. Afterwards, a focus group interview was conducted focusing on teachers' experiences of digital project assessment. The results indicate that while the teaching and assessment of collaborative digital projects are not aligned, the teaching of digital literacy making use of digital resource may augment 'traditional' assessment. Following this conclusion, a necessity of further collaboration among EFL teachers appears, aiming at developing the assessment of the collaborative aspect of digital projects. [For the complete volume, see ED578177.]