Designing Digital Assessment Strategies in Teacher Preparation: A Case Study

Introduction

The process of preparing new teachers for their roles in the classroom poses a challenging enough landscape for Teacher Educators to navigate, but helping Teacher Candidates determine how to infuse or integrate technology effectively into their teaching has additional layers of challenge. The sheer breadth of tools and applications available in a modern classroom means that new teachers must not only understand how to identify and use the tools but must be able to place them in the context of their own classrooms so that they most effectively address their learners’ needs. The challenge of selecting the tool or application, determining the setting in which it will be used, then determining ways of organizing its use and assessing its value to their teaching requires an organizational schema for thinking about such tools. One conceptual framework that has been in use for almost two decades has been Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) developed by Mishra & Koehler (2009) which contextualizes the teacher’s knowledge of content, pedagogy, and technology and also their knowledge of how those three key concepts interact. The TPACK model was recently updated to include the overarching concept of context (XK) which “would be everything from a teacher’s awareness of available technologies, to the teacher’s knowledge of the school, district, state, or national policies they operate within.” (Mishra, 2019, p. 76). The acknowledgement emphasizes the complexity of the task for Teacher Candidates.

To assist Teacher Candidates as they learn how to infuse technology into their lessons, there are a number of additional frameworks that can work as scaffolds as they develop their skills. These frameworks are relatively well-known among Teacher Educators and include Puentadura’s Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition (SAMR) model (Hilton, 2016) as well as the Passive, Interactive, Creative and Replaces, Amplifies, and Transforms (PICRAT) (Kimmons et al., 2020). One or more of these frameworks can be used to scaffold learning events geared for Teacher Candidates to use technology effectively in their teaching (Kolb, 2017). One of these key learning events in the development of a Teacher Candidate is training in the development of assessments of learning. One learning strategy that has been broadly studied is to have them apply their knowledge of educational technology in authentic or professionally realistic settings in the hope that these types of engaging experiences will give them a better understanding of the link between teaching theory and practice (Tondeur et al., 2016).

The development of a strategy for assessing learning in the classroom setting can be a gateway for thinking about the use of technology in lesson planning and instructional design in which learner outcomes are aligned with assessments in an intentional manner. Teacher Candidates can be encouraged to think about technology infusion in their own classrooms by spending structured time during teacher preparation considering the development of online learning experiences then implementing them with a specific focus on the development of an assessment strategy that uses digital assessments. Such assessments, depending on the technological landscape of the classroom, could occur in either a face-to-face or remote classroom setting or even asynchronously.

This chapter will examine, in broad terms, the challenges faced by one Educator Preparation Program (EPP) in developing the skills required to create and review these assessments as well as examine potential benefits of the use of digital assessment tools for collaborative interactions and learner engagement. Since there are many tools and applications available to teachers, this chapter’s recommendations will be as generic as possible and not refer to specific devices, tools, or platforms if possible. If anything is certain in educational technology it is that commercial platforms and tools change, lose relevance, merge into larger tools, or fade away into dim memory by either being priced out of the grasp of the average teacher or by being rendered irrelevant or obsolete by better the improved functionality and features of newer tools.