Alternative Assessment and Recognition of Creativity and Achievements
Abstract
Alternative assessment contrasts traditional one in many ways. It gives students situations that occur in the real-world and requires them to apply their relevant skills and knowledge. It requires students to develop their own responses to a given situation, rather than following one or more prescribed paths. It also requires students to apply higher order thinking skills, such as analysis, evaluation and synthesis (creation of new knowledge), and not just reproduce facts that they have remembered and apply standardized problem-solving procedures. As a consequence, higher order thinking is more difficult to learn or teach, but also more valuable because such skills are more likely to be usable in novel situations (i.e., situations other than those in which the skill was learned). It requires different learning, teaching and assessment methods than the learning of facts and concepts.
Students creativity and achievements can be assessed in a number of alternative ways, and alternative assessment technology in the digital era offers abundance of tools to help teachers conduct alternative assessment and learners prepare for and go through it. Some of the typical methods and tools used in alternative assessment include self-assessment, peer assessment, e-portfolios, e-checklists, e-rubrics, concept maps, journal entries, collaborative development projects using Social Web tools, and presentations and discussions using e-communication tools.
One of the latest trends in educational technology, very suitable for alternative assessment, is that of Open Badges. Open Badges have evolved as novel means of recognizing and credentialing skills, competences, creativity and achievements in various learning settings (formal or informal, online or traditional classroom).
Biography
Vladan Devedzic is a Professor of Software Engineering at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Belgrade, Serbia. His long-term professional objective is to bring close together ideas from the broad fields of intelligent systems and software engineering. His current professional and research interests are focused on technology-enhanced learning (TEL). His other interests include software engineering, programming education and intelligent software systems.
He has authored/co-authored more than 330 research papers (about 60 of them have been published in internationally recognized journals by publishers such as ACM, IEEE, Elsevier, etc.), six books, and several chapters in books on intelligent systems and software engineering edited by distinguished scientists.
He has also developed several practical software systems and tools, and has participated in a number of internationally funded projects (FP7, LLP, SEE-ERA, etc.). So far, he has also given 2 keynote talks and 26 different tutorials on intelligent systems, TEL and software engineering at international conferences, numerous lectures and in-house seminars on different software engineering topics, and seven nationwide tutorials on current trends in software engineering.
He is the founder and the chair of the GOOD OLD AI research network.