Chapter 10- A reflection

Chapter 10 “assessing meaningful learning with technology” is about how technology can be a means of conducting learner assessment. I feel that I’ve experienced a lot of technological assessment since I’ve been in school but this chapter did introduce me to a few that I never really had thought of before. The chapter emphasizes that technology can allow teachers to assess more frequently and provide more and better feedback to learners to improve their performance. I like this idea about assessing more frequently although I don’t think traditional ways of assessment, or tests, should be more frequent but rather an overall process of gathering and analyzing data to determine if the students have achieved the learning outcome that was desired.

From reading this chapter I have definitely learned that assessment in school is not an option. It's something that has been occurring since schools first started but since the big hype over standardized tests has started assessment has gotten a very bad wrap in school systems. For a parent, teacher or student to say that assessment is bad would be foolish. There are better ways to administer assessments though than the traditional way. This chapter offered ideas for assessing what students know using different applications of technology. All of them were given with the potential to harness meaningful learning. Perhaps more important than this, however, was the fact that these ideas are meant to provide a window into discovering what learners really know while providing rich information that can be organized into meaningful feedback to learners that can improve performance. I agree with the chapter that this type of assessment would be much more beneficial for students in the long run because it assesses long-term information rather than how well they can memorize in order to pass.