Formative Assessment and Technology

Educational technologies have the potential to enhance formative assessment in as much as they:

• provide immediate feedback about the students’ solutions, thus providing the teacher with an overview of the class’ achievement of the target competence
• enable teachers to monitor students’ incremental progress and keep them oriented on the path to deep conceptual understanding, providing appropriate remediation to address student needs;
• support positive student’s thinking habits, such as arguing for their point of view;
• create immersive learning environments that highlight problem-solving processes;
• give powerful clues to what students are doing, thinking, and understanding;
• enable most or all of the students contribute to the activities and work toward the classroom performance, therefore taking a more active role in the discussions;
• provide students with immediate private feedback, encouraging them to reflect and monitor their own progress;
• provide multi-level analyses of patterns of interactions and outcomes thanks to their potential to instrument the learning space to collect the content of students’ interaction over longer time-spans and over multiple sets of classroom participants