Futures of Assessment
We work with diverse educational stakeholders to imagine, appraise and create future assessment scenarios and techniques that take advantage of the new possibilities of digital, AI based assessments, and emergent technologies. Our anticipatory futures approach creates opportunities to re-imagine assessment designs and uses to take advantage of rapidly changing technology to improve the quality, effectiveness, and resilience of education systems. This creates opportunities for exciting digital transitions and innovation. If you or your organisation are interested in working with DEFI on the Futures of Assessment, please contact us at: defi@hughes.cam.ac.uk.
Envisioning the Future of Educational Assessment
Working on the near future, we link up translational research and education systems, to imagine, debate and design educational assessments with immersive, interactive and collaborative assessments. We are deeply engaged with the design of new assessment ideas and constructs, such as future possibilities for the assessment of collective intelligence, hyper-personalised and collaborative assessments. We see the possibilities for future assessments to be more reliable, inclusive and fair, for example, with adaptive, multi-sensory content.
Looking further ahead, we can imagine new scenarios. For example:
Is it possible that ‘mode’ distinctions might dissolve, as pen-and-paper becomes digital, and as written texts, video and oral communication combine with augmented, adaptive and immersive realities, and with continuous marking and feedback?
Might future assessments help test takers to have more agency and voice, for example, with opportunities for personalised test designs, timing, content, and difficulty?
How might the application of ‘digital twins’ create more effective assessments, and more enjoyable student learning?
How might future examinations combine reliability, fairness, inclusion and test security with more enjoyable, personalised content?
These are exciting scenarios. However, the adoption of future assessment designs and techniques and the management of anticipatory change is no easy task. The integration of technology change in assessment involves uncertainty, which can be challenging and risky for education systems, for test takers, education researchers, policy makers and parents. At DEFI we use creative, dialogic ‘futures’ methods to help those stakeholders to work together, to appraise future oriented signals and scenarios, and to imagine, appraise, shape and plan preferred futures.
Collaboration with Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Using Futures Lead Dr Fawaz Abu Sitta’s Horizon Scanning method, DEFI’s Innovation Lab worked with Cambridge University Press & Assessment to complete a comprehensive project looking at potential futures of assessment.
The report was presented at the AEA Conference Nov 2023 and a link to the full report can be found below.
The Futures of Assessment: Navigating Uncertainties through the Lenses of Anticipatory Thinking
Our People Working on Assessments
Dr Bryan Maddox
Research Director, Assessment Futures
