The era of the pencil and paper test is over: online assessment platforms have opened up the possibility for customized, insightful testing like never before.
One of the main advantages of digital assessment platforms is the opportunity to add capabilities through integration with services, tools, and content functions. These integrations enhance the testing experience and provide benefits to both students and educators.
We’ve outlined some of the ways partner integrations can take your online assessment platform to the next level.
Personalization and accessibility
Integrating adaptive technology with your digital assessment platform allows you to personalize the testing experience to meet students’ unique needs. For students with disabilities, this means they can receive their accommodations in a non-intrusive, fully integrated format.
For example:
- Text-to-speech tools can help students during the reading, writing, and language comprehension portions of assessments. This added technology makes testing more accessible for students with disabilities and English learners.
- With certain integrations, digital assessment platforms can also support English learners by easily translating assessments into different languages, including Unified English Braille.
Such integrations have the potential to remove the stigma of “visible” accommodations, allowing students to stay in the classroom with their peers and simply toggle their accommodations tools on and off within the testing portal.
Enhanced insights
Online assessment platforms provide deeper insights into student knowledge with enhanced assessment and scoring capabilities.
Some schools have employed adaptive testing technology, crafting assessments that progressively route students to easier or harder questions depending on how they score. This technology allows educators to get a better sense of the range and depth of students’ knowledge by tracking their understanding of the testing material at different levels. With this feedback, educators can then tailor their instruction to fill the gaps identified by the assessment.
These additional insights would not be helpful if educators had to wait a year for the results — as was the case with traditional pencil-and-paper testing. Online assessment platforms can provide instant scoring, allowing educators to address deficiencies immediately. This functionality enables educators to be more responsive in the classroom and improve learning outcomes faster.
Alternate formats
Online assessment platforms have inspired a new wave of creative assessment techniques, including drawings, lab experiments, and multi-step math problems. These new techniques open the door for educators to craft engaging, real-world assessments.
Integrated tools can assist educators in grading these complex digital assessments by automatically routing them to a manual grader and then instantly attributing results to the student upon completion.
In addition to new assessment types, online assessment platforms also allow educators to administer testing on a flexible basis.
- Instead of one, summative assessment at the end of the year, digital assessment platforms’ customizable process allows educators to administer smaller, single-standard assessments throughout the school year.
- The Putnam County Consortium, for example, found success using a year-long, multi-stage testing format to provide ongoing feedback about what students understand and where they need additional help.
Although many types of assessments can be fully integrated within an online assessment platform, some types of assessments still require elements of paper-based testing. Thankfully, due to their customizable nature, online assessment platforms are flexible enough to accommodate hybrid digital and manual assessments. To simplify this process, integrated service partners are available to manage the paper elements end-to-end, from shipping to grading and reporting.
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Online assessment platforms can provide a highly customizable experience for both students and educators, resulting in better insights and educational outcomes. When you expand the power of your digital assessment platforms by integrating tools, content, and services with your platform technologies, the possibilities for your school or district become virtually endless.
TAO partners with leading organizations you already know and trust, and upcoming innovators successfully serving assessment programs around the world. Plus, by being an interoperable platform at its foundation, TAO works with any other interoperable tool or application within your EdTech ecosystem. That’s how you pave the road to customized, insightful testing like never before.
