New Ideas for Assessment- during the COVID crisis and beyond.

New Ideas for Assessment- during the COVID crisis and beyond

With learning being interrupted during the COVID-19 crisis, you may not think immediately about assessment.  Assessment is however an important aspect of the learning process. It is used to support the learning process (formative assessment), providing feedback to learners to make progress, and to assess the final achievement of students (summative assessment) as a basis for certification. 

The COVID-19 crisis presents countries with specific challenges concerning assessment. This is especially true for vocational education and for continuing professional training where demonstration of competence under real conditions is important.   

The most urgent challenge is the organisation of the end of year assessment and especially for students in their final years, their final exams. The COVID19 crisis did not only interrupt the training and practice in companies, it faced students with the prospect of having to wait for the return of normal circumstances to enable them to finish their studies and enter the labour market.  

Feedback gathered by Unesco last month and by the EU Presidency and our ETF mapping show that many countries postpone exams. Many countries still hope to reopen schools in time to have the final assessments this academic year, but dates are not fixed. Even if schools reopen, it is not always easy to determine “safe” conditions for practice and exams. Some exams are therefore cancelled basing the results on earlier partial assessments during the year, some exams arrangements online are made.  These issues do not only affect students in this school year that is finishing, but will influence learning and assessment in 2020/2021.  

We want to assist in finding good solutions for the current problems, but not only that. We are convinced that the emergency measures that are being considered, will have an impact on learning and assessment in the future. In that light we will be carrying out different activities to facilitate the discourse on the role of assessment.  

We would like to discuss how countries deal with the situation, how this affects current learners, what kind of solutions exist and how assessment might be addressed in the future. We will use this page on ETF Open Space to share all materials and information on assessment. Together with you we would like to explore the principles behind valid and reliable assessment and different solutions for effective feedback, safe assessment and evidence of competence. 

We have had the first webinar on assessment on Wednesday 13 May, you can find all materials of the webinar here.