If you grew up in the early 2000's like I did, congratulations, you survived the technology boom of the new millennium. Schools had computer labs where students learned to type and on clunky desktops. Technology was new enough that state standardized testing became digitalized but most teachers were hesitant to implement it and continued using traditional paper-and-pencil assessments. For me, that was roughly 10 years ago. What baffles me most is the fact that not much has changed.
I’m guilty of this now as a third-grade teacher. My students are assessed in a variety of ways, but 99% of them exclusively involve non-digital technology. Why is this? For me, I know there are several factors that have limited my experience with assessment technologies. However, for this post, I am going to focus on the fact that, as an educator, I feel overwhelmed by all the work required of me and creating digital assessments feels like another task on my list. There is the mental load of creatively conjuring the assessment and the physical load of finding the technology and using it to create the assessment. Luckily, there are technologies to help minimize this work!
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been buzzed about non-stop for the past 6 months, if not longer. There are many different opinions regarding the use of AI in education. I intend on presenting a case for using AI as a tool to assist educators with the creation of assessments. ChatGPT is an AI program that responds to prompts provided by users. I am proposing that educators can, and should, use AI programs like ChatGPT to generate ideas to help them create assessments. For example, when I prompted ChatGPT with the question “What is a creative digital assessment for assessing weather and climate for 3rd grade?” the program provided me with the following assessment technologies: virtual word search, digital weather journal, climate quiz show, weather and climate video project, researching weather around the world, and climate art gallery (ChatCPT, 2023). The ideas generated by ChatGPT could lift the mental burden of creativity and could encourage the implementation of digital assessments!
Another AI program that is geared towards educators is Conker. Conker is a program that creates assessments and activities through AI. First, you provide Conker with the topic you are wishing to assess, then you choose what type of questions will be asked in the quiz, the grade level you are assessing, and the output language. You are also able to include source material that will be presented alongside your quiz. The questions provided could be a great starting point for an online assessment you could create for your class!
You might be questioning why I am standing firm on the idea that educators should use AI to help create their own assessments, and not use AI to create assessments for them. This is due to the fact these AI programs have not been in our classrooms. They do not know our content and the way we present it to our students. These AI programs also do not know our students and their prior knowledge, and educators know the importance of considering these factors while creating assessments.
This is a screen shot from the response ChatGPT created following my prompt: “What is a creative digital assessment for assessing weather and climate for 3rd grade?”
Reference
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (3.5 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
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