Education Next – Michael B. Horn and Julia Freeland
“We can all remember getting tests back with a big grade at the top and”‘x’s” marked next to the problems we got wrong. If we were lucky, a teacher, tutor or parent was willing to go over those mistakes with us and fill in the gaps where we had struggled. If we weren’t so lucky, or frankly, if we had no real incentive to do so, we probably shoved the test into our backpacks and moved on to trying to get a handle on the next batch of material on which we would be tested in the coming weeks. This often-broken cycle of addressing what students don’t know is not the fault of the teacher or student. Classrooms simply were not designed to maximize individual student understanding with the precision for which we might hope. Education technology, however, is shifting what’s possible–and the benefits for students and teachers could be tremendous, so long as recent attempts to protect student privacy–itself an important goal–don’t get in the way. Using online learning, assessment and data analysis, we can more precisely pinpoint what students know and where they are still struggling at the moment they are struggling. We can then use that information to drive better learning.”(more)