From Standardized Assessment to Automatic Formative Assessment for Adaptive Teaching

Abstract

The use of technology in education is constantly growing and can integrate the experience of school learning allowing an adaptive teaching. One of the teaching practices in which technology can play a fundamental role is the assessment: standardized, summative and formative. An Automatic Assessment System can offer fundamental support to teachers and to students, and it allows adaptive teaching: promoting practices of formative assessment, providing effective and interactive feedback, and promoting self-regulated learning. Our university has successfully developed and tested a model for automatic formative assessment and interactive feedback for STEM through the use of an Automatic Assessment System. This article presents a training course for teachers focused on the adaptation of questions designed for standardized assessment to questions for formative assessment to develop mathematical skills, problem solving and preparation for INVALSI (national standardized tests). The teachers created questions with automatic formative assessment, reflecting on how to adapt the requests to the different needs of students and how to create guided learning paths. The activities created by the teachers, their reflections on the training module and on the activity carried out with students are analyzed and discussed.

University Training for Future Primary School Teachers on Automatic Formative Assessment

“…We conceptualize interactive feedback as a step-by-step interactive process guiding the learner in the resolution of a task after one or more autonomous attempts . Our model requires the use of an automatic assessment system and it is supported by theories on formative assessment and feedback (Barana et al, 2020b). Interactive feedback is a step-by-step interactive solving process which shows a path to the solution after one or more autonomous attempts by the learner.…”