There is no doubt that assessment plays an important role in teaching and learning. Teachers can collect data to better understand students’ mastery level of certain knowledge and skills, which promotes modifications, including, but not limited to, learning objectives, learning content, and pedagogy.
Generally speaking, assessments are categorized into formative assessment and summative assessment. Summative assessment means to evaluate students’ performance and learning outcomes at the end of a course unit. Formative assessment aims at identifying students’ area of struggles and strengths to help instructors provide ongoing feedback to improve students’ learning experience. In traditional formative assessments, teachers use pre-tests and post-tests to make a decision about what learning materials and content need to be taught.
The goal of assessment is to measure students’ ability on a task. Nevertheless, only a few assessments results are used to improve learning. According to Kevin Miklaszwhich, students’ prior content knowledge, level of persistence, and interest will influence their ability on a task. However, test items in traditional assessments are always decontextualized and boring, which destroys learners’ interest and they are less likely to persist in the assessment. Carol Dweck found that children who hold a fixed mindset (intelligence is unchangeable) view mistakes as a sign of low ability, while children with a growth mindset (intelligence can be increased through effort) view mistakes as a process of learning. From my perspective, the traditional formative assessment, such as quizzes and tests, is actually teaching children intelligence cannot grow. However, educational games have the potential to teach children intelligence can grow by giving them engaging animation tutorial, instant and constant feedback, and motivational rewards by creating a reward system. Assessments in digital games are embedded assessments and they help create players’ automatically updated portfolio. Since these fun contextualized assessments are embodied in specific content knowledge, they are more likely to spark learners’ interest and help them perform their best.
You can find lots of examples in BrainPOP. BrainPOP is an animated educational website, covering subjects of science, social studies, English, math, engineering and technology, health, arts, and music for K-12 grade students. Animated videos and interactive games are designed to engage students. I strongly recommend you to visit BrainPOP: https://www.brainpop.com/. GameUp is BrainPOP’s educational game website, you can find a collection of free online educational games and get inspired!
How can digital games be used in assessment? What’s your opinion? Share your tips and tools in the comments!
Comments
Post a Comment