There are two distinct issues of assessment: the assessment of educational technology and assessment with technology.
Assessments of educational technology have included the Follow Through project.
Educational assessment with technology may be either formative assessment or summative assessment. Instructors use both types of assessment to understand student progress and learning in the classroom. Technology has helped teachers create better assessments to help understand where students who are having trouble with the material are having issues.
Formative assessment is more difficult, as the perfect form is ongoing and allows the students to show their learning in different ways depending on their learning styles. Technology has helped some teachers make their formative assessments better, particularly through the use of classroom response systems (CRS). A CRS is a tool in which the students each have a handheld device that partners up with the teacher's computer. The instructor then asks multiple choice or true or false questions and the students answer on their device. Depending on the software used, the answers may then be shown on a graph so students and teacher can see the percentage of students who gave each answer and the teacher can focus on what went wrong.
Summative assessments are more common in classrooms and are usually set up to be more easily graded, as they take the form of tests or projects with specific grading schemes. One huge benefit to tech-based testing is the option to give students immediate feedback on their answers. When students get these responses, they are able to know how they are doing in the class which can help push them to improve or give them confidence that they are doing well. Technology also allows for different kinds of summative assessment, such as digital presentations, videos, or anything else the teacher/students may come up with, which allows different learners to show what they learned more effectively. Teachers can also use technology to post graded assessments online for students to have a better idea of what a good project is.
Electronic assessment uses information technology. It encompasses several potential applications, which may be teacher or student-oriented, including educational assessment throughout the continuum of learning, such as computerized classification testing, computerized adaptive testing, student testing, and grading an exam. E-Marking is an examiner led activity closely related to other e-assessment activities such as e-testing, or e-learning which are student-led. E-marking allows markers to mark a scanned script or online response on a computer screen rather than on paper.
There are no restrictions to the types of tests that can use e-marking, with e-marking applications designed to accommodate multiple choice, written, and even video submissions for performance examinations. E-marking software is used by individual educational institutions and can also be rolled out to the participating schools of awarding exam organisations. e-marking has been used to mark many well known high stakes examinations, which in the United Kingdom include A levels and GCSE exams, and in the US includes the SAT test for college admissions. Ofqual reports that e-marking is the main type of marking used for general qualifications in the United Kingdom.
In 2014, the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) announced that most of the National 5 question papers would be e-marked.
In June 2015, the Odisha state government in India announced that it planned to use e-marking for all Plus II papers from 2016.