Formative Assessment with Mobile Devices

It seems that once schools, colleges and universities go beyond the technical challenges of implementing formative assessment tools, there could be great benefit in using these tools in the classroom or lecture hall.  I understand that the technical challenges can be daunting and implementing these technologies into everyday use will take training and a reassessment of curriculum.  A classroom clicker could easily be replicated onto a mobile platform, so a move to mobile platform could be less of a disruption.  Ensuring that students have access to mobile devices is key to using mobile formative assessment.

For both students, teachers, and professors having access to formative assessment information will allow for a check of the student’s knowledge acquisition and understanding.  For my case study, I reviewed the Khan Academy, a grassroots effort to bring better understanding of math, science, finance and the humanities.  This project started off recording instructional videos and posting the videos to YouTube, but there are also self-paced exercises that fall into the category of formative assessment.  These exercises would provide an interesting mobile application, but the Khan Academy has not moved to developing mobile technologies rather focusing on its library of video lessons and exercises on the internet; these exercises could be accessed through a mobile web browser which would be quite beneficial for students.

In further thinking about this topic I came across a micro-blog site from a researcher at Columbia University’s Teachers College.  Kate Meersschaert followed a class of 7^th graders as they created audio clips on their mobile devices to describe their understand inequalities as they apply to a real world context.  The students observed liked using multimedia for their project, but there was a heavy dependence on tools not supported by the school.  The teacher discusses some of the limitations including: dependency on cloud services and they have no control over the service – if the service goes down so does the student’s assignment  Additionally the lack of time was noted as a limitation.  Creating multimedia, even for adept students, does take time and when introducing technology projects into the curriculum, it is important that students have time to produce a quality learning artifact.  The time to produce such an artifact may mean reconfiguring the curriculum or taking other topics out of the curriculum.