Rather than find and discuss general issues across all of online assessment in K-12 English Language Arts (ELA), it’s more useful to look at 3 grade level cohorts and focus on specific challenges each group faces.
K-3 students should be limited to 1 hour of personal screen time per school day.
These students need to interact with other people (siblings, classmates, educators) and the “real world” as much as possible.
The best use of online assessment for them is short and engaging games that reinforce teacher-taught lessons, like identifying parts of speech or how to spell.
The main problem with ELA online assessment in grades 4-8 is the massive range of student ability.
Some students can barely read.
Other students wolf down the entire Harry Potter canon in 10 weeks.
Two ways to help this cohort is to build online assessments that react and become either more or less difficult, depending on student answers, and to provide each student access to a personalized artificial intelligence (AI) tutor, like Khanmigo.
These AI tutors will not “give away” answers but guide students to ask a series of thoughtful and targeted questions that get them closer to needed information.
For high school students, the central issue with online ELA assessment is the huge amount of written content generated by them.
For essay feedback to be actionable, it needs to be given rapidly, but that can’t happen if teachers have dozens of essays to grade each weekend.
Students either get their work returned in a few days with a couple vague comments or returned weeks later with more specific feedback, but long after they have forgotten what they wrote about in the first place.
The solution is to have students write in-class essays in a timeframe (45 minutes) but with access to their personalized AI tutor.
Assigning multi-page, independent research essays isn’t useful anymore because students can access large language models, like ChatGPT.
Besides, a 20-page essay isn’t better than a 2-page essay just because it’s 10x as long.
An essay is just a person telling you what (and showing you how) they think about a particular subject. The quality and clarity of the thinking matters most.
Shorter, digital-only student essays would be assessed, ranked, and given feedback by AI. This would save teachers a lot of time.
After this first pass over written content, teachers could read each essay (or passages highlighted by AI) and add comments (people type faster than they write), then return it to students quickly, so that their feedback is fresh and resonates.
There’s a lot of work to be done to improve ELA online assessment.
It’s an exciting time!
Short games, personalized tutors, and AI first passes are 3 ways this field could be made better for students and teachers.