Improving Formative Assessment Practice with Educational Information Technology

Terry Vendlinski, David Niemi, Jia Wang, Sara Monempour

This paper describes a web-based assessment design tool, the ADDS, that provides teachers both a structure and the resources required to develop and use quality assessments. The tool is applicable across subject domains. The heart of the ADDS is an assessment design workspace that allows teachers to decide the attributes of an assessment, as well as the context and type of responses the students will generate, as part of their assessment design process. While the tool is very flexible and allows the above steps to be done in any order (or skipped entirely), our goal was to streamline and scaffold the process for teachers by organizing all the materials for them in one place and to provide resources they could use or reuse to create assessments for their students. The tool allows teachers to deliver the assessments to their students either online or on paper. Initial results from our first teacher study suggest that teachers who used the tool developed assessments that were more cognitively demanding of students and addressed the “big ideas” rather than disassociated facts of a domain.

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