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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1850/TEFA2016_Preface.pdf
Workshop on Technology-Enhanced Formative
Assessment (TEFA) 2016 in conjunction with the
Eleventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced
Learning (EC-TEL) 2016, Lyon, France
Editorial
Eric Ras1, Ivana Marenzi2, Bernardo Pereira Nunes3,4
1 Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Esch-sur-Alzette, LUXEMBOURG,
2 Leibniz Universität Hannover,
L3S Research Center, Hannover, GERMANY,
3 Department of Informatics, PUC-Rio, BRAZIL
4 Department of Applied Informatics, UNIRIO, BRAZIL
eric.ras@list.lu, marenzi@l3s.de, bnunes@inf.puc-rio.br
1 Motivation
Technology-based assessment has its origin in the early nineties where paper-pencil
test was replaced more and more by assessment using technologies. Learning often
occurs collaboratively in learner networks, formal learning is combined with informal
learning, and learners increasingly use open educational offers such as MOOCS or
publicly available Open Education Resources, personalised learning environments
adapted to their needs and preferences, or they use specific workplace oriented learning
services. Technology-based assessment are part of many learning environments with a
large variance in item types and feedback formats. Formative assessment is a means to
continuously generate feedback and to increase learners’ awareness about their learning
progress as well as to support them in moving forward towards achieving the targeted
learning goals. Formative Assessment has already demonstrated its positive impact on
learning in general, and it can help learners to become self-regulated learners.
Formative assessments aim for a continuous assessment cycles with appropriate
feedback. This challenges researchers and engineers to develop formative assessment
solutions that scale on the hand (e.g., large amount of items needed) and which are
aligned with the underlying competency (construct) models on the other hand. In
addition, new technologies (e.g., augmented reality, wearables, etc.) are used in
learning environments that provide new opportunities but also challenges to embed
assessment into learning processes.
From a visionary perspective, technology-enhanced formative assessment will be
integrated seamless in diverse technical learning environment, where it offers
personalized learning experiences in different contexts, for everybody and for many
relevant skills of the 21 st Century.
2 TEFA workshop
On these bases, the TEFA workshop (Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment,
http://www.ccead.puc-rio.br/tefa2016/) focused on formative assessment as a support
for learning in today’s innovative technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environments,
and as a component for extending existing or new TEL approaches. The goal was to
develop the notion of technology-enhanced formative assessment further combining
expertise from pedagogy, educational measurement, cognitive science, and information
technology.
The event was initiated by the special interest group on Technology Enhanced
Assessment (SIG TEA) and the European Association of Technology-Enhanced
Learning (EA-TEL: http://ea-tel.eu); it was held in September 2016 in conjunction with
the 11th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 2016 in Lyon,
France.
The workshop provided an opportunity to bring together experts from different
fields: technology-based assessment, educational measurement, IT&TEL, pedagogy,
teacher education, educational psychology, etc., willing to share their experience about
their work in the field of technology-based learning and to provide insights about how
formative assessment could enhance motivation and learning in TEL environments.
These proceedings collect contributions of the best papers presented at the workshop
as well as invited papers providing an interdisciplinary forum in which scientists and
practitioners exchange new ideas and applications on technology-enhanced formative
assessment.
The following contributions represent different approaches to innovate in formative
assessment. They cover different phase of assessment (e.g. learning gap detection,
rubrics design, data analysis, feedback processes etc.)
The main research questions addressed in this collection are:
• How are established forms of formative assessment changing with the
inclusion of technology and what new forms of formative assessment become
possible? How is this reflected in new approaches to educational
measurement?
• How can we build, maintain, communicate and negotiate learner models so
that they maximize the value of formative assessment for learning?
• What is required to empower the users (students, peers, teachers, parents,
employers, workers) to make best use of TEFA in order to guide learning?
• How can integrated and continuous formative assessment be supported by an
ICT infrastructure?
• How can information technology help to innovate the ways in which TEFA
methods are developed?
3 Workshop contributions
The following presentation led to a fruitful discussion during the workshop:
• Buchem (Distributed Assessment with Open Badges of 21st Century Skills)
presented Open Badges as an alternative form of assessment. She promotes
Open Badges to help to recognise skills and other achievements from multiple
sources. Badges offer a verifiable representation of a competency, skill etc.
and can be shared across OBI-compatible portals. A case study with migrant
academics demonstrates how distributed assessment works.
• Fernandes Medeiros et al. (Towards a Personalized Placement Assessment
Method to Support Students' Knowledge Gaps Identification) explained how
teachers can be supported technically to identify learning gaps of their
students. The adaptive assessment techniques make use of graphs and is based
on the structure of the content taught.
• Kiy et al. (Facilitating Portfolio-driven Learning in a Personal Learning
Environment) elaborated on how e-portfolios can be integrated into
personalized learning environments. Portfolio pages in form of Blogs are
submitted by the learner to receive feedback from peers. In a second step the
lecturer assesses the portfolio pages as well as the peer feedback to give a final
grade. Results of first user tests with the platform were very positive.
• Rusman et al. (Viewbrics: Formative Assessment of Complex Skills with
Video-Enhanced Rubrics in Dutch Secondary Education) address the limited
capacity of mental model building of text-based rubrics by offering video-
based rubrics to learners. The design of a quasi-experiment was proposed at
the early stage of this project.
In addition, two papers were invited to the proceedings of TEFA 2016:
• Finamore et al. (A Case Study of a Probability and Statistics Course:
Improving Students’ Performance with Formative Assessment) presented a
case study of a Probability and Statistics course using a formative assessment
approach as an attempt to improve students’ approval rates, identify students
who need support and enhance the teaching and learning process. The
proposed formative assessment was responsible for improving students’
performance and approval rates in approximately 11% of the cases.
• Morais et al. (Formative Assessment supported by Analytics Techniques: a
case study on teacher and students perceptions) investigated which metrics can
be used to better predict student’s dropout in a higher education context.
Analysis techniques such as the K-Means clustering algorithm were used to
cluster student interactions logged by the LearnWeb platform and to
investigate the perception about the formative assessment process as well as
to get a better understanding of students’ interpretation of feedback.
4 Program Committee
• Bernardo Pereira Nunes – PUC-Rio / UNIRIO
• Bill Warburton – University of Southampton
• Cristian Cechinel – UFPel – Federal University of Pelotas
• Davide Taibi – Italian National Research Council
• Desirée Joosten-Ten Brinke – OUNL
• Elena Caldirola – Università degli Studi di Pavia
• Elisabetta Parodi – Lattanzio Learning S.p.A.
• Ellen Rusman – Open University of the Netherlands
• Eric Ras – Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology
• Gilda Helena Bernardino de Campos – CCEAD PUC-Rio
• Giovanni Fulantelli – National Research Council of Italy
• Ivana Marenzi – L3S Research Center
• Marco Kalz – Welten-Institute – Research Center for Learning, Teaching
and Technology
• Maria Bortoluzzi – University of Udine, Italy
• Maria Cinque – Università degli Studi di Udine / Fondazione Rui
• Maria Perifanou – University of Athens
• Patricia Jaques – UNISINOS
• Sean Siqueira – UNIRIO
• Tania Di Mascio – University of L’Aquila
Acknowledgements
We, as guest editors and the SIG TEA, are grateful to all the authors who provided their
valuable contributions, as well as to the reviewers who helped us in the review process,
the participants of the workshop for the fruitful discussions, and finally the organiser
of the ECTEL 2016 conference. We hope that readers enjoy reading this multi-facet
collection dedicated to formative assessment. Further, we thank the organisation
committee and in particular the workshop chair for providing us with the necessary
rooms and equipment to conduct this event.
Biographical notes.
Eric Ras received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of
Kaiserslautern, Germany. He has worked for more than 15 years as a scientist and
project manager on different public and industrial projects in the domain of
technology-enhanced learning and knowledge management. Today, he leads the
group Embedded Assessment at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology,
Luxembourg. His team manages several international projects in the field of
technology-based assessment (TBA) and learning. With regard to technology-based
assessment, his particular interest is to assess 21st Century skills with smart enabling
technologies (e.g., tangible user interfaces or dialogue-based systems). Further, he
researches how to automatize the assessment lifecycle, for example, by using
knowledge models and Linked Data to generate test items for formative assessment.
He has authored more than 100 scientific publications. He is PC member of different
conferences in the domain of technology-enhanced learning and assessment and has
organised many workshops and symposiums on the topic of assessment. He is chair of
the Special Interest Group TEA (Technology Enhanced Assessment) of the European
Association of Technology Enhanced Learning (EATEL). Next year, he will chair the
2017 International Technology Enhanced Assessment Conference (TEA2017).
Ivana Marenzi, PhD, is senior researcher at the L3S Research Center in Hannover,
Germany. She obtained her PhD on the interplay between Content and Language
Integrated Learning and Web 2.0. Her main area of research in Technology Enhanced
Learning (TEL) includes the support of collaborative and lifelong learning. As
educational technologist her main interest is dealing with issues related to the adoption
of new technologies in education. She is referee for international journals (e.g. Elsevier
LeaInD, IJTEL) and conferences, and has collaborated in organizing conferences and
workshops in the field of TEL (e.g. ICWL 2016, EbTEL, TEFA 2013, 2016).
Bernardo Pereira Nunes holds a Ph.D. and master in computer science,
postgraduate in pedagogical mediation for distance education and a computer
engineering degrees from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC–Rio).
Currently, Bernardo is an Adjunct Professor of the Department of Informatics at PUC-
Rio, Collaborator Professor in the Computer Science Department at Federal University
of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), senior system analyst of the Central
Coordination for Distance Learning (CCEAD) of PUC–Rio and Associate Editor of the
Brazilian Journal on Computers in Education. Bernardo has participated and led many
academic and industry-oriented projects that have been awarded by Brazilian and
International institutions. He has also has published about 50 scientific publications in
peer-reviewed journals, and conferences, and worked as a research assistant at the L3S
Research Center of Leibniz Universität Hannover in Germany and as a research visitor
at the High Performance Computing Lab in the CNR Italy in Linked Data, TEL,
Semantic Web, e-Learning, Data Mining and Web Archiving E.U. projects.