Abstract
Digital tools are reshaping how we understand assessment and evaluation in educational contexts as they create new forms of digital assessment data. Such data has been critiqued by educational scholars as it is increasingly associated with high stakes accountability, with the computational interpretation and abstraction occurring at a distance from the authors and their learning experiences. This chapter explores an alternative, educative vision for digital tools and the assessment data they collect. It is a case study of how a digital self-assessment tool captured evidence of early career teachers developing their assessment capability. It also positions an innovative digital research methodology within global sociological concerns about digital assessment tools, to consider how they might inform locally meaningful data stories.
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Notes
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The research team included the authors, along with Leanne Crosswell and Chad Morrison.
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Glossary
- Abductive reasoning
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Abductive reasoning is sometimes known as inference to the best explanation, and can be thought of as the guess which provides the most likely explanation for a surprising phenomenon. It is contrasted to inductive reasoning where generalisations are made from specific observed phenomena, and deductive reasoning which involves reaching a logical conclusion from given premises by following rules of deductive logic.
- Reflective Writing Analytics (RWA)
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RWA uses natural language processing (NLP) technologies to computationally analyse reflective text, interacting with human insights for the purposes of scalable meaning-making (Gibson, 2017).
- Socio-technical analysis
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Socio-technical analysis is a dialogue between human deliberations and generated computational analytics. This dialogue is focused towards a dedication to a practical outcome—the application of the analytics to support further action.
- Transepistemic Abduction (TeA)
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TeA is the application of abductive reasoning that occurs across two or more distinct epistemic domains towards a productive end that cannot be reached from a single domain (Gibson, 2017).
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Willis, J., Gibson, A. (2020). The Emotional Work of Being an Assessor: A Reflective Writing Analytics Inquiry into Digital Self-assessment. In: Fox, J., Alexander, C., Aspland, T. (eds) Teacher Education in Globalised Times. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4124-7_6
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