Assessment in Digital Textbook Use and Development

Introduction

The term “assessment” refers to any activities that teachers use to help students learn and to gauge student progress and learning analytics. Educational assessment is the process of documenting, usually in measurable terms, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and beliefs. Assessment can focus on the individual student, group, class, the textbook quality, or the educational system as a whole. There are many types of educational assessment:

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  Initial, formative and summative;

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  Objective and subjective;

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  Criterion-referenced, norm-referenced, and ipsative;

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  Informal and formal.

Educational assessment is a paved way for learning quality. However, although the growth in digital models of assessment is due to a number of factors, the most influential are based on innovative and interactive technologies for learning in diversity of environments. A broader range of digital tools connect assessment from platforms to on-going instruction with textbooks. These digital technologies serve students in a stringent necessity to be more competitive, adaptive and accommodative in a learning environment. In addition, teachers and parents can check learning analytics. However, changing teachers’ role in education requires new digital assessment tools and methods, which will place new demands on the tasks, roles and responsibilities of the student(s) or/and the teacher(s). One of these is based on using “digital concept mapping for formative assessment” (Krabbe, 2014).

As was indicated on Online Educa Berlin (2013), the most current assessment methods have a strong emphasis on knowledge and recall and do not capture the critical skills and attitudes dimension of key competence. The assessment of transversal key competences and the assessment in the context of cross-curricular work appears inadequate. What is the main cause of this effect? Maybe, the cause is “textbook continues to be a major vehicle for the transfer of knowledge” (Fryer, 2014). Or, maybe, the fact that students prefers digital reading, because “digital content is increasingly present in classrooms across the world, with a current push to increase the rate at which digital textbooks are adopted” (Choppin, Carson, Borys, Cerosaletti & Gillis, 2014, p. 11).

The digital content of textbook can incorporate different forms of assessment, allowing for conventional storage, learning analytics and summarizing the results. These evidence that students’ progress during learning can be scored automatically, transmitted to the teacher and distributed as individual, group or colaborative class activity. The initial as well as the progress assessment and reports on the students' results are instantly available to the teacher, parent and student. This form could be either interactive or adaptive, and used to inform decision-making factors or to self-assist own achievements in learning.

This chapter assists that assessment is important not only to measure the students’ outcomes during learning processes, but more important is to design tasks focused on adaptation and accommodation of student in real learning environments of the base on patterns and metappaterns. It’s delimited to a meta-overall framework for understanding the psychological and pedagogical concerns of assessment in digital textbook use and development. While the reliable usage of digital assessment tasks is important, it depicts the cognitive level of the students, it is just one part of a design issue. The second part is to understand what items are needed to engage all students in deeper learning with digital textbooks. And, not less important is to understand what feedback and feed-ward loops are required. Finally, what is the task’s difficulty, and how to design a self-assessment quiz focusing on learning analytics?