Educational psychology – challenges and possibilities of assessment

Grete ArroResearch fellow in Institute of Pscychology and Educational Innovation Centre, Tallinn University

ICT in education – highway to the better future. (Indeed)

ICT in education - new technologies, innovative learning- and teaching methods, digital content

-> More up-to-date and open educational space will result in high-quality and effective education ->

-> impacts to economy, international competitiveness, better skilled workers

Digital techology integrated into all aspects of our life except education

(SWD 2013 341 final)

But also…

- The potential impact ICT educational solutions and digital content is widely recognized

- Several ICT-based learning initiatives are started- However - initiatives have been isolated and fragmented- Investments to the infrastructure often do not bring along

the ability and motivation of teachers and students to use them

- Thus, many projects have ended after the piloting phase (SWD 2013 341 final)

- Learning, like every behavior, occurs in interaction between individual and environment

- The effectiveness of learning is related to the ability of the learning environment (whether it be the teacher or ICT-solution) to specify the current level of ability/ skills/ knowledge/ motivation/ attitudes of the learner and design an appropriate learning context

- The ICT-tool itself does not do anything, if it does not „understand“ cognitive development and adapt to the developmental level and specific learning difficulties of the learner; but it can be developed in a „developmentally informed“ way

Why assessment is important

Detecting and addressing learning difficulties – problems in all levels from basic processes to complex ones – is what the new tools ought to do (and this mindset is one of the secrets behind the Finnish educational miracle, too)

Pedagogical philosophy and practice:

The school is there for every child and the school must adjust to the needs of each child, not the other way around (Aro et al., 2011) – this ought to be the leading motive of ICT-solutions as well addressing that idea assumes that ICT educational solutions are developed in (furious) cooperation with cognitive psychologists and teachers

What and how to assess comes before designing the new and shiny educational solutions

…to avoid the situation „Whe have a spaceship here! Let’s fly to somewhere!“

Examples of what I’m talking about:A game for helping children learning to read

…even more examples: learning compex things with a system that follows your reasoning process

…adaptively foster self-regulated learning

…use the adaptive comparative marking to judge the performance

…or help children with attention problems

The fundamental focus of educational research

- Development occurs in the interaction of individual and environmental factors

- In order to understand (optimal) development, both types of factors need to be studied, as well as their joint impact

(Aro et al., 2011; Melzer, 1996)

Thus – educational assessment needs to be:

- theoretically oriented – in our case: cultural-historical, constructivistic- structural-systemic – as we need to understand the new emerging

wholes- multi-levelled – as there are aspects affecting the child on individual and

on group/class/school level- longitudinal – as development is understandable only when the change

in important variables is observed- methodologically diverse – cognitive ability tests, standardized self-

report scales, open-ended questionnaires, experimental methods etc

…which is the case in our research projects

Examples of the projects

Project SHTHK06126 „Effectiveness of Estonian primary school“ (2006-2009)

Project RU/2712 „Bilingual child in Estonian school“ (2009-2014)

Project S10012 „General competencies and their assessment“ (2011-2014)

Project KA/8914 „Developing Test Battery for Assessing Basic School Students’ Psychological Processes and Educating Support Specialists“ (2014-2016)

…and many others

Assessment sounds nice, but why talk about it in the context of ICT in education?

- Development of psychological processes is not directly observable in the classroom – it is difficult or impossible for the teacher to observe motivational, cognitive, or executive processes

- Thus, learning difficulties or -deficits may remain unattended and the respective functions or processes will not be developed

- ICT-based educational assessment/learning solutions might help in real time to find out the problems in different levels of complexity – from basic cognitive processes (e.g. working memory), executive functioning (e.g., planning, effort regulation), learning strategies (organizing information for memorizing), or motivation (indirectly or self-assessed) - in case the developer of the digital solution knows, what is important to measure.

- Adaptive testing/learning vs traditional classroom – if some process is difficult for the learner, moving on and leaving the problem unaddressed is a problem.

- If practicing, offered by the adaptive digital solution, does not work (e.g. because of some neurological problem), the child may get help earlier as the tool may act as a preliminary diagnostic device and inform the adult/teacher about it.

Conclusions

all this is well-known;

there are numerous ICT-based assessment tools and learning environments developed;

However, most of the classrooms are still „traditional“, both in the sense of ICT tools and in being developmentally sensible

As in-depth and complex educational ICT-based assessment assumes a number of different topics and research questions to be addressed, cooperation between research institutions would be recommended in order not to remain fragmented

Benefits of educational psychology research in TLU

- Research group with very different and indepth research interests and experience in cognitive processes, motivation, general competencies

- Experience in complex (child-school-teacher-parent) and longitudinal educational research projects

- Size matters - it is easy to achieve the representative sample of schoolchildren in a small country like Estonia

- Size matters once again – nothing is there yet - no fixed governmental educational assessment system -> possibility to build it up flexibly

- Relatively reasonable research funding system

- A lot of internet everywhere!

Thank you

If you want to discuss interesting stuff, please contact arro@tlu.ee or skype gretearro