Digital Assessment Tools in Tired Organizations - Inclusive Boost, Ethical Dilemma, or Additional Strain

• In Event: Roundtable Session 11
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: The challenges and impacts of assessment

Proposal

Assessment in education has a controversial history that originates in neoliberal implications such as market-driven mechanisms and accountability while at the same time manifesting categorizations and impeding inclusive tendencies. Demands for more process-orientated assessment practices with direct implications for pedagogy have become louder. In educational practice, however, summative status-driven assessment continues to dominate and shape education, students' learning processes, and learning environments worldwide. At the same time, the demand for digital applications and tools has exploded due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the realization that the comprehensive implementation of digital innovations in the school organization is laborious.

Questioning these trends, the international Erasmus+ Project I AM aimed to create a digital assessment tool that follows inclusive education paradigms builds upon existing scientific knowledge on educational assessment, and intends to meet the needs of the diverse involved actors to promote equity in education for all students regardless of social dimensions such as disability, gender, socio-economic status, etc. Therefore, the project consortium consisting of seven European institutions/universities (Vienna Board of Education, the University of Vienna, Jönköping University, School of Education Porto Polytechnic, Arctic University Tromso, Belgian Centre for Special Education, and the University of Leipzig), applied a participatory research approach. By doing so, the participatory involvement of researchers, superintendents, teachers, and students led to the development, implementation, and evaluation of an inclusive assessment tool called I AM.
In an initial research phase, some experts particularly highlighted the demand for a digital tool that automatically generates tailored outcomes due to their lack of time and enables quick application. According to teachers' identified needs, the I AM tool became a web-based, comprehensive tool that provides teachers with automatically generated analysis practice-oriented suggestions to improve their students’ learning environments. Nevertheless, regardless of its digital nature, the additional tool brought additional strains to an already impacted system. The second (research) cycle represented the operationalization to identify specific demands on local contexts across Europe. Focus group discussions in the four national contexts and an international survey accompanied by teacher training were implemented to examine and test the I AM tool on the ground. The third (research) cycle was the evaluation to frame global needs and launch the I AM tool. The whole research and implementation process considered diverse ethical concerns and data-security issues according to the European General Data Protection Regulation.

The contribution aims to introduce the Inclusive Assessment Map as an open-access and innovative web-based tool for teachers and educators to improve learning environments. Next to reporting findings from the research and implementation, this contribution aims to question the application and advantages of digital tools in the realms of overburdened contexts as one of the main findings pointed towards the tiredness of school organizations to implement digital and inclusive innovations. We conclude by highlighting general thoughts on the implementation and sustainability of web-based tools (such as I AM) in an overwhelmed education context and aim to question where digitization can aid institutional contexts and whether digital foci currently lie with learning, teaching, or administrating processes.

Authors

• Lisa-Katharina Moehlen, University of Vienna

• Eva Verena Kleinlein, University of Vienna

• Michelle Proyer, University of Luxembourg