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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

Formative assessment in Science and
Mathematics Education (FaSMEd)
The Research Centre for Learning and Teaching
Newcastle University
NE1 7RU
UK

Email: fasmed@ncl.ac.uk