foreign [Music] so one of the questions that is frequently Asked is is why is it that our current educational assessments may not be very suitable for the 21st century and in what ways do they potentially need to change and this is a complicated question but I think that we can start with recognizing that the importance of educational Assessments in terms of the larger signals they send to teachers and parents and policy makers in terms of what are the important things that should be learned and this what the signals they send to schools um in terms
of of what the curriculum should look like so if we understand that what's on assessments sends powerful signals about what's important then we can begin to see that the assessments we have right now in fact most large-scale assessments international national state driven and even a lot of classroom assessments only focus on a very small segment of what it is we want students to know and be able to do often the way this is discussed is that there are a set of 21st century competencies that are very important in the current climate with respect to the
needs of students and citizens and this includes things like collaboration communication critical thinking problem solving reasoning um and many of these competencies and so-called 21st century competencies are not well assessed if at if they are assessed at all on many contemporary assessments so one of the changes that's needed is to focus more on these constructs that are more in tune with 21st century society and needs then simply the kinds of constructs and things that we measure on contemporary assessments this doesn't mean that we should stop assessing certain key Knowledge and Skills that are part of
the educational system and that are part of the curriculum but what it means is that we need to go well beyond that in terms of the the kinds of competencies that we want to assess we need to assess and that need to actually become the focus of classroom teaching and learning we have to think about what are the elements of these competencies and then what are the ways in which in the classroom in the course of classroom teaching and learning in the course of instruction how we can help students develop these competencies what are the
implications for the kinds of learning environments and the kinds of tasks and activities we want to see implemented in the classroom that will help develop these competencies but that also provide opportunities for us to observe how well students are doing in in in developing these competencies and being able to exhibit them and to have control over uh these these kinds of activities of thinking and reasoning and dialogue and interaction to move in the kinds of directions that uh we're we're thinking in terms of these 21st century competencies and skills and how do we assess them
and provide evidence that's going to be useful and usable we have to think about the infrastructure for assessment um and and that infrastructure involves a number of components one part of the infrastructure is just simply um thinking about the what we need in the way of the intellectual resources to design these kinds of situations these are not just simple uh tasks where we're just thinking about maybe the mathematics or the science we're also thinking about um can communication collaboration social emotional issues self-regulation so so one part of the infrastructure is we we need to bring
on board um multiple aspects of disciplinary expertise from different areas um in Psychology and education in the academic discipline so that's part of the infrastructure we call it the intellectual Capital that's needed to create these kinds of environments and situations and to design them well so we know what it is we're trying to assess and also what information we are trying to extract from those situations and environments that's part of the infrastructure another part of the infrastructure is technology to do much of what we're talking about and to be able to Monitor and uh those
situations and also to gather the information about what students are thinking and how they're thinking and what they're doing we need a technology infrastructure that is capable of delivering um these environments which oftentimes are rich multimedia environments with multiple things for students to do but those environments also need to be able to capture Student Response processes so that we can extract that information and and so so we what we need is part of the infrastructure is we need technology design but it's not just about the technology it's about thinking about what technology affords in the
way of Designing environments that are rich engaging and that allow us also simultaneously to gather the information we want that's going to help us figure out what it is that students are doing um why they might be making the choices they are and then what are the implications of that another part of the infrastructure is we have to have the capacity to make interpretations about what is happening in these environments and and do that in a way that provides useful information to Educators so that they can act on that information to guide student learning you
know it's it's one thing to capture Rich information about what students are doing in interesting multivariate multi-dimensional multimedia environments it's another thing to make sense of that information in ways that can be made useful to Educators so we need a part of the infrastructure is is on what I would call the interpretive side how do we how do we build the capacity into these environments to extract the information and then present it to Educators and the public so that they can understand what it is that we've asked students to do what it is that they
have shown us and what are the implications for um further developing students competencies and skills so those are three parts at least three parts of the infrastructure that we have to have it's on the design side it's on the implementation side with technology and it's on the interpretive side [Music]