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Imagine having a learning information environment which provides learners, parents, teachers and the public with all they need to know about student progress without having to have end-of-program tests. That seems like science fiction? The College of Education is thinking ambitiously about such a possibility, while working modestly and incrementally to build a web-based-learning environment which does just this.

Earlier in 2009, a team lead by Dr Bill Cope won a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Education to create the Assess-As-You-Go Writing Assistant. This will be a web-based working environment in which students can create written texts, as well as embed images, sound and video. Students will be able work both individually and collaboratively, representing online various kinds of complex knowledge performance - such as scientific report writing or persuasive writing in language arts.

A repertoire of mechanisms of assessment will accompany student work at all times:

  • Teacher-created and student-actioned rubric or schema based tagging
  • Automated natural language processing
  • ‘Web 2.0’ style commenting and rating of student works by teachers, parents, experts, peers and self
  • Psychometric mechanisms to measure individual student progress over time and individual student performance in relation to cohorts (the class, students of the same demographic profile etc.).

These mechanisms will provide students with continuous feedback (formative assessment), whilst also collecting enormous amounts of data on student learning activity, and synthesizing this into more valid and reliable summative assessment data than available in today’s end-of-activity or end of program tests.

This exciting project involves a world-leading, multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Illinois: writing experts Dr Bill Cope, Dr Mary Kalantzis and Dr Sarah McCarthy; psychometrics expert Dr Hua-hua Chang; evaluation expert Dr Lizanne deStefano; and computer scientists Dr Dan Roth and Dr Marc Snir. The team will trial the environment in Grade 8 Science and Language Arts classrooms in Urbana-Champaign and Danville.

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