The new school year is fast approaching, and with it comes a new approach to testing. It’s time to transition to giving student assessments online.
But what are the benefits of online assessment?
Read this guide to find out how online assessments can optimize your outcomes. That way, you can get back to doing the best part of the job: teaching your students.
Reduce Administrative Burden
You can reduce the burden of grading by using online assessments instead of traditional pen-and-paper tests. This is one of the major benefits of online assessment, as it reduces the amount of paperwork that teachers have to do.
Many teachers spend hours grading a single test for all their class periods. If you’re giving more than one exam per quarter, this can be an absolute nightmare for a teacher’s workload.
Many online assessment platforms are self-grading, making it a breeze to collect data about your students. Having this information available helps you make important decisions about your students and better plan your next class.
With online and instant grading, you can get back to teaching your students and supporting them in their learning.
Instant Data Access
Since many online assessment tools offer instant grading and feedback for multiple-choice exams, you can get instant data about your students. This allows you to make changes or offer feedback to your students the very next class.
Students can often forget what happened on tests and are much less likely to remember areas they are struggling with after a few days have passed. If you’re using pen-and-paper tests and it takes you a few days to grade them, your students have already forgotten what they knew (or didn’t know) on the day of the exam.
Having this data ready to address with students right away helps them learn from their assessments rather than dumping their brains to show that they did or did not study.
Maintain Fairness and Validity
Technology is the new standard, and teachers expect students to know how to use a computer for almost every aspect of their education. They have access to a computer for their classroom learning in many schools and their homework outside of class.
Thus, it is fairer for them to use technology to take an assessment, rather than a pen-and-paper test. This prevents unnecessary stress for the students learning how to fill in scantron sheets. Not to mention the financial burden on the family to buy a scientific calculator, just to use it for one state test.
There are many ways for online assessment platforms to maintain integrity as well. Secure online access allows you to monitor testing students regardless of their location. This helps to maintain fairness in assessment.
Another benefit of online assessments is that it allows you to offer different exams to different students based on their English proficiency level or other factors. You can tailor the exam questions to individual students to help meet their individual learning plans.
This helps to maintain test validity. You can assess whether the student knows the material, not the English language. This works for all kinds of individual learning needs, and keeps it private from other students.
Flexibility is The New Normal
In a post-pandemic world, we are changing the way that schools and many other aspects of our society function on a daily basis. If a student must stay home to quarantine or because they do not feel well, online assessments allow them to stay caught up with their schoolwork.
This will prevent students from falling behind, and it will also help reduce test anxiety for students if they are able to take their exams from home. We must offer flexible environments for student assessments as part of the new normal. Failing to do so puts some students at an unfair disadvantage.
Save the Environment
Using online exam software instead of pencil-and-paper tests will have a profound impact on the environment over time. Save trees by moving your testing online.
As any teacher can tell you, they have to shred an astronomical amount of paper at the end of each school year. Many schools use over 2,000 sheets of paper per day.
Any paper you can save for any reason will make a big difference. Using online tests instead of paper ones will cut a large amount of the paper down for the school year.
More Reasons to Move Your Assessments Online
Online assessment tools that come with the testing platform are free for students to use. This means you can get everything you need, including a scientific calculator, right on the testing platform. This reduces the financial burden on the student and their family.
Another part of test validity involves rotating questions and answers. This prevents students from cheating since you can scramble the question order and answer order for individual tests. This is much easier than making a form “A” or “B” for your paper tests and offers a lot more variety.
You can achieve the best outcomes by transitioning to online assessments for your students. Students feel more prepared when they have had practice using the testing platform. This also removes poor penmanship from the equation for written questions, since students are able to communicate their points more clearly by typing their answers.
Get Back to Teaching
Transitioning to having your assessments online can help you get back to teaching and supporting your students. It saves time, and the planet, and helps you get the valuable data you need to support your students’ learning.
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