Does EdTech add value to classrooms?Formative assessment
As someone from a teaching background working in EdTech, I’m often amused by the gap in perceptions between those who create products and their users.
Tech workers rarely question the idea that digital tools make life better. In contrast, I hear scepticism from teachers about claims that EdTech brings anything new to the classroom.
Teachers have reason to be sceptical. Classroom techniques have been developed over centuries, and human relationships in the classroom seem more valuable than anything found in an app. Educators have also endured decades of hype surrounding the ‘next big thing’ in EdTech.
So can EdTech bring anything new?
EdTech does bring convenience. The Internet provides a content resource bigger than any school library. Material can also be distributed instantly using tools such as Google Classroom without the need for piles of photocopies. And learning management systems have helped streamline organization and communication.
However, while helpful, none of these things actually improve the classroom.
Is EdTech just a convenience then?
I don’t think so. There are a few ways that EdTech can actually bring added value to the classroom. Today I want to look at one of these: formative assessment.
What is Formative assessment?
‘Formative assessment’ has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years. Some see it as a fad, others an excuse for over-testing. This is a shame, as the ideas behind formative assessment are powerful and effective.
Formative assessment is an approach by which learners are given goals, relevant activities, and constant feedback highlighting gaps between current performance and goals.
It is an approach with significant empirical support (see John Hattie’s extensive reviews of effective interventions on student achievement).
In his Embedded Formative Assessment (p.46), expert Dylan Wiliam describes five strategies to bring formative assessment to the classroom:
- Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success
- Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning
- Providing feedback that moves learning forward
- Activating learners as instructional resources for each other
- Activating learners as owners of their own learning
While such strategies are possible in a traditional classroom, digital technology provides additional transparency and immediacy to support formative assessment.
Eliciting evidence of learning
Any pedagogically-sound course will communicate learning goals and success criteria to learners.
However, how do we assess how close learners are to fulfilling their goals?
Informal polls are a great way to get a quick snapshot of where everyone is in the class. Anonymous polls using student devices are powerful as they allow teachers to get a sense of progress across the class without individuals having to expose gaps in their knowledge.
Quiz tools, like Kahoot, are also great for getting a sense of class-wide progress and knowledge gaps.
The English-teaching app I work on, EF Class, provides a sophisticated approach to eliciting evidence of learning. Teachers send varied activities to students, including multiple choice, short-answer, and longer written tasks.
When students submit their answers, teachers can immediately see how many students have finished their work, the average performance of the class, and can then look into individual answers and results during class time.
Providing effective feedback
One of the most exhausting stages of a traditional lesson, both for the teacher and students, is checking answers after an activity. A teacher goes through an exercise and one or two students put their hands up and read out answers.
In contrast, most digital activities provide instant feedback on exercises, allowing students to immediately see knowledge gaps and adjust accordingly. Many systems also provide model answers for more open questions, so students can compare their answers to an example. This frees up whole-class work for higher-level discussions, rather than mechanical answer checking.
AI for instant feedback
Artificial intelligence is also having an impact on marking. A range of intelligent systems, such as Grammarly, are now able to give feedback on basic linguistic and stylistic issues in students’ written work. This frees up the teacher to focus on higher-level feedback on content or creativity.
Direct feedback
Teachers can also send direct feedback to students via services such as Google Classroom. There is no delay in students getting feedback, and no need for students to be ‘picked out’ from their peers for a one-to-one chat.
Feedback can also be related directly to curriculum goals, with numerous services providing matrices allowing transparency on which curriculum goals students have met, and which areas require further work.
It seems that digital technology is able to provide instant, targeted feedback in ways that are practically impossible in a traditional classroom.
Peer collaboration and ownership of learning
Dylan Wiliam suggests that peers should be used as a resource in providing feedback. This is both practical, and gives students a chance to deepen their understanding by teaching someone else. Collaborative spaces, from Google Docs to Padlet, provide students with opportunities to share work, respond to peers’ efforts, and receive peer feedback inside and outside the classroom.
Arguably the most difficult formative assessment strategy is allowing students to take ownership of their own learning. Unless students take on board feedback and use it to adjust their learning, formative assessment can’t take place.
In EF Class, an approach to fostering this attitude is for students to complete an ‘exit ticket’ at the end of lessons, encouraging them to focus on what they feel they have learned and where they feel there are gaps. Teachers can then access these tickets and use them to help plan the next lesson.
Next steps: Differentiation
Once teachers and students have identified areas where there are knowledge gaps, the question arises: how do we deal with them? At this point, differentiation becomes necessary, with teachers and students seeking the right level of support and challenge required to bridge individual gaps.
How is this done? In my area of language-teaching, an option is to give students texts at different levels of difficulty, allowing them to build on existing reading levels to deal with gaps (as implemented in EF Class).
EF Class also provides activities marked as support and challenge. Teachers can ‘queue up’ these activities for the class, and students can do the appropriate activities at their own pace.
There are numerous further tools that provide support for differentiation — this topic deserves its own post. Nonetheless, we can certainly argue that technology provides additional options via which teachers can respond to the knowledge gaps revealed through ongoing formative assessment.
Final thoughts
It has been argued that EdTech does little in the classroom other than streamlining existing interactions. However, formative assessment is one area in which EdTech can actually help improve learning and teaching.
Teachers now have a variety of digital solutions allowing them to gain evidence of student progress, provide effective feedback, and allow students to work together to complete tasks.
It is up to those working in EdTech to make these tools even more effective in giving teachers and students transparency in learning and feedback and helping students take ownership of their own learning.
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