Educators, New Zealand: Cognizant’s Vice President and Global Delivery Head of Education Services Says the Next Generation of Educational Assessments Must Operate as a Continuous Developmental Aid in a Student’s Educational Life

“Educational assessments continue to evolve at warp speed. The landscape is transforming into a set of digitally guided activities that are increasingly actionable, outcomes-oriented (results unified with instruction), and able to facilitate students’ continuous learning,” writes Balakrishnan Shanmugham. Excerpts:

“Given that classrooms today are increasingly digital, educational assessments need to evolve to deliver richer and more predictive results that can inform educators of an individual student’s learning patterns and abilities.

The next generation of educational assessments must move from evaluating ‘how much’ to ‘how to succeed’, and operate not as a one-time only event, but as a continuous developmental aid in a student’s educational life.

The advent of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) and other digital technologies has opened new possibilities for alternative assessments through better information literacy, social media and ubiquitous access.

It is increasingly evident that technology can improve every step of the assessment process, starting with test development, rendering and scoring, through reporting and results analysis. Adaptive learning design is now driven by assessment outcomes. As a result, every step of the assessment value chain is undergoing a radical transformation.

In order to analyze the data from learning interactions and assessments, and improve learning outcomes for individual students, institutions will need predictive tools.

Today’s educational institutions need to move forward with continuous data-driven insights to improve assessments and learning outcomes.

Educational institutions will need to evaluate the potential of technology carefully to move forward with continuous data-driven insights that would improve learning outcomes and meet millennial learners’ needs.” 

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