It is traditionally thought that exams are the best way to assess students’ knowledge and skill. However, there are weaknesses to this approach, and there are alternatives that actively seek to account for differences in each student, the human condition, real-world situations, and student empowerment. These alternatives have the intent of placing the student’s learning needs first in order to obtain mastery rather than the achievement of a score. This student-centered approach to assessment seeks to remove pressure, add repetition of using knowledge and skills, understand how the students are thinking, and apply real-world situations for relevant and practical experience. It also imparts a measure of responsibility on the students to assess each other and the process. In order to make testing student-centered we need to direct our attention to a few elements. Student cognitive development needs to directly involve the students themselves in an objective way that targets learning first and the grade second. This can be done with students working alone, in a group or a mix of the two (LaLopa, 2005).
For assessments to be more student centered, students should be graded on projects rather than tests or rather that projects should be tests, and group work can be used to individually assess each student. The projects allow for assessment to be lower pressure for the students than summative exams. Also, they can be designed around a three-part learning method of: encoding, storage, and retrieval. The last stage is especially important, and the more that students pull information from their memory, the more they master it. A test only requires students to remember once (Frisella, 2019).
The students should also be assessed about how they are developing their talents and interests. Teachers should take the time to discover the things the students really enjoy learning and the things they hope to be exceptional at. How often does it happen that a student is asked throughout their academic life, “What do you want to do with your life?” and they respond with the enigmatic response of, “I don’t know.” It happens all too often, and it is the fault of the teachers and education system for not encouraging students to reflect and be passionate about learning. One way to fix this is to make talent discovery and mastery a priority in students’ learning (Miller, 2015).
Using the concepts of spacing and interleaving for structuring tests is also helpful. Instead of having large tests that could require“cramming”, they should be broken up over a longer period of time into mini-exams and quizzes. The content would receive the same learning time as normal, but it would be spaced out over a longer period of time and the students would not spend a lot of time on one topic in a single instance. Instead, the students would talk about different ideas or topics or interrelated topics within each lesson. This interleaving technique allows students to shift to things they are more interested in, to connect information across multiple ideas, and build a memory and understanding through association (Frisella, 2019).
Technology and AI can give the teacher the option to have the students assessed according to the processes the students use. For a teacher to break down projects and processes that many students are creating may be too much for a teacher to handle, especially when trying to get a wide-range understanding of the students’ abilities, but technology can organize such data quickly into specific and informative indicators. Also, it can provide for real-time feedback, allowing students to more quickly understand the success or failure of their efforts and to understand which specific aspects are working or not. It is one thing to say to a student, “You need to participate more in group work” and another to say, “I saw that when another student challenged your ideas, you always let the other student do their idea instead of yours.” (Frisella, 2019).
Technology is also allowing for students to assess their work according to simulated real-world conditions. This allows the students to take on the roles of scientists and inventors and see the consequences of their processes and judgments without the real-world consequences, expense, and loss of time. What better test is there than the real world? It could be argued that a simulation cannot begin to match the real-world, but simulated tests are used by experts all the time for real-world applications (Frisella, 2019).
Students can then be given further power to assess themselves. This type of student-centered assessments can be implemented in multiple ways depending on the teaching strategies, student differentiation and special needs of the class. Two great examples are listed by Mick Lalopa from Purdue University. The first way is for the students to work together, going through the course material and deciding which material is the most important. From there, they work in groups or pairs to set up an evaluation that will test their knowledge of the course. The other example is presentation orientated. The students create their own class rubric that a group of judges will use to evaluate their presentations. This allows the students to truly be involved and understand their assessment (LaLopa, 2005).
Providing the students with a rubric and the ability to go back and revisit work is also beneficial. These things not only allow the students to get a perfect score, but it encourages students to revisit knowledge, review, correct, and develop mastery. This method allows the students to achieve a process rather than a score. The student is now attempting to achieve all the things in the rubric rather than memorizing data. This is also the basis for what we are doing in Teach-Now (Frisella, 2019).
Sources: