The future of assessment faces major challenges including, perhaps most importantly, the extent to which assessments, when enabled by IT, can serve simultaneously the needs of learners and those of the enterprise of education (Bennett, 2015). IT-based assessment has been advancing rapidly and its growth is set to accelerate with emerging opportunities for automatic data collection as well as increased possibilities of communication and interaction mediated by IT. This presentation aims to provide an overview of the range of different opportunities for IT to support assessment (Webb & Ifenthaler, 2018). We identify and discuss challenges for moving towards a situation where IT-based assessment can serve learners’ needs as well as the broader needs of the educational system for evaluation. We examine theories related to assessment more generally as well as specifically to IT-enabled assessment and review recent research and development. Scenarios for IT-enabled assessments may take many different forms, some of which hold much promise for supporting learning but there are theoretical, developmental, technical and human challenges to be overcome. In particular, the presentation will highlight the contributions of the section Assessment as, for, and of 21st-Century Learning Using Information Technology which is part of the International Handbook of IT in Primary and Secondary Education. These contributions include Formative Assessment and Feedback Using Information Technology (van der Kleij & Adie, 2018), Progress and Challenges for Automated Scoring and Feedback Systems for Large-scale Assessments (Whitelock, & Bektik, 2018), and Making Use of Data for Assessments: Harnessing Analytics and Data Science (Ifenthaler, Greiff, & Gibson, 2018). Our vision is for IT-based assessment design to move forward with designers, teachers and learners working together to design assessments that support 21st-century curricula and pedagogy. In this shared endeavour, we expect that data can be collected and represented to enable learners and teachers to identify achievements, collate evidence of those achievements, diagnose needs, both cognitive and affective, and decide on suitable pedagogical approaches for enabling the next steps in learning. The presentation will conclude with a number of challenges for moving towards a situation where IT-based assessment can serve learners’ needs as well as the broader needs of the educational system for evaluation at various levels (Webb & Ifenthaler, 2018).

Bennett, R. E. (2015). The Changing Nature of Educational Assessment. Review of Research in Education, 39(1), 370-407. doi:10.3102/0091732x14554179 Ifenthaler, D., Greiff, S., & Gibson, D. C. (2018). Making use of data for assessments: harnessing analytics and data science. In J. Voogt, G. Knezek, R. Christensen & K-W Lai (Eds.). The Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. van der Kleij, F., & Adie, L. (2018). Formative assessment and feedback using information technology. In J. Voogt, G. Knezek, R. Christensen & K-W Lai (Eds.). The Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Webb, M., & Ifenthaler, D. (2018)). Assessment as, for and of 21st Century learning using information technology - An overview. In J. Voogt, G. Knezek, R. Christensen & K-W Lai (Eds.). The Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Whitelock, D., & Bektik, D. (2018). Progress and challenges for automated scoring and feedback systems for large-scale assessments. In J. Voogt, G. Knezek, R. Christensen & K-W Lai (Eds.). The Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.