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Instruction and Assessment in the Classroom: Use of Technology for Formative, Summative, and Authentic Assessment

Technology can assist instructors to track as well as assess their students’ performance in classroom (Thomas & Tanner, 2003), facilitate communication between teachers and learners, and create students’ growth (Cohen, 2017) and development in digital records that can easily be passed over from pre-kindergarten to grade school (Liu et al., 2017).  Thus, technology enhances formative assessments for better summative outcomes of students. In addition, technology can assist teachers to comprehensively understand their students’ minds. This paper aims at discussing the use of technology for summative, formative, and authentic assessment, providing example for each age group: birth to age 5/Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten to age 8/Grade 3.

Technology influences formative, summative, and authentic assessments. With reference to formative teaching, technology allows for continual feedback between students and teachers (Nepo, 2017). Knowhow can be employed to enhance and augment the measures of assessments’ conventional core skills like literacy and numeracy. Cohen (2017) states that technology can encourage students to employ their reasoning and critical thinking skills, be extra creative and gain skills by using various techniques and devices. For instance, when teaching children below the age of five, some teachers help their learners arrange printed numbers and letters to form statements, sing songs aimed at improving their mastery of skills and knowledge deemed appropriate by their teachers as seen in Teaching Channel (2019a). Similarly, for students above five, they are given bricks that they use in constructing a building kind of structure with the ultimate goal of helping them improve their individual learning achievements. 

Regarding summative assessments, technology encourages students’ growth and makes it simpler for instructors to assess and grade their students’ work. Some grade schools have programs that continually assess their students by constantly asking them questions relevant to topics of study. For instance, for students below five years, some schools use musical performance, speeches, and compositions among other techniques are employed to enhance students’ authentic and formative assessments while for students above 5 years, digital photographs, scanners, and computer-generated movies are used for purposes of improving the learners’’ summative assessments’ outcomes (Teaching Channel, 2019).

Lastly, with regard to authentic assessment, technology gives teachers ways of continually getting feedbacks during students’ learning process as opposed to at the end of the learning process when one ends up merely with a reflective understanding (Wang et al., 2014). For students below five year, some teachers employ assessments like listening to students, watching students, having learners self-assess to better the students’ intellectual attainments that are significant, meaningful, and worthwhile (Thomas & Tanner, 2003). For authentic assessment, some teachers ask their students above five years what they have learnt. From kindergarten to age 8/Grade 3, students are taught through demonstrations and asking of questions aimed at giving the students immediate assessment regarding what they what they have learn and how to adjust for the better (Liu et al., 2017). 

To sum it up, technology significantly influences classroom assessment of students, if well employed.