Assessment plays an important role in learning because it gives a direction to students by feedbacks and clear identification of learning gaps. Some of the assessments are for learning, some are as learning and some are assessments of learning. There are many ways to assess students in schools like formative assessment, summative assessment, e-portfolios and reflections, assignments, quizzes etc. I have read about all of these in my course of Learning through Pedagogy and Technology and Role of Technology in Education. Formative assessment provides feedback when the learning takes place. Summative assessment is not for feedback most of the time but it gives a clear result of passing or failing a subject after learning process. Assessment should not only focus on academic content but also on critical thinking and real-life problem-solving skills. If we talk about the role of ICT in assessment then there are tons of technological tools which are helping students in self-monitoring, understanding their progress and help them in learning. Digital assessments are also tracking skills of a student nowadays. Tests like NTS tests that are marked by computer systems use OMR (Optical Mark Recognition). Learning Management Systems are very helpful in assessment. Most of the LMSes are tracking students’ weaknesses, strengths and skills like Khan Academy, BYJU and Learn Smart Pakistan. Digital assessments quizzes are based on MCQs (Multiple choice Questions), fill in the blacks, true-false and matching the right answer. E-portfolio (Electronic-portfolio) is the evidence assembled and managed by the user on the web. It gives a view of learner’s personal growth in learning as they complete complex activities. E-portfolio contains text, images, multimedia and hyperlinks. WordPress, Dreamweaver, super link and Asymmetric toolbook can be used to create E-portfolio. Mahara is the fully featured tool to create E-portfolio. Then comes online assignments in which peer reviewing is the latest trend in which students share assignments with each other and give feedback. Google Docs is the best tool for this purpose and I liked the add-on features and real-time feedback is the in Google Docs. When individual assignments are given to students then the best way is to provide a digital rubric with that because rubric will help students in self-assessment. R-Campus, RubiStar and Quick Rubric are the best tools for digital rubric creation. Google forms is also the best app to create digital quizzes. I remember when we used kahoot in the class where Dr. Gulab Khan created a quiz and asked us to choose an option. I personally didn’t like that much because there was very less time limit to answer a question but Sir managed it by showing question and asked the class to give votes for each option and then explained the correct one. So digital assessments seem to have so many benefits but at the same time, there are lots of disadvantages associated with digital assessments like you need a proper setup if you want to go for digital assessments which will be very costly. Bring your own devices does not work all the time because it is difficult to manage so many devices. A reliable and valid test is not easy to create so a test expert or subject matter expert is required. Apart from these disadvantages, digital assessment provides a qualitative assessment and it maps students’ performance and improvements. We cannot ignore the power and benefits of digital assessment. Knowledge is changing so are the tools of assessments. I am very much in the favour of digital assessments because of real-time feedback and skill mapping with quality questions. But we should be careful in using technology in classrooms to avoid its dangers.
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