Common Core assessments are going digital. We’ve made great progress in developing exciting technology-enhanced items (TEIs) for math and science. You can do so much with TEIs in these disciplines because it’s all about the math. But what about making TEIs for English language arts (ELA)? That’s a bit of a problem, because ELA is too open ended—there can be so many right answers.
One ELA approach used on printed tests is the EBSR (evidence-based selected response). Students answer a multiple-choice question (that’s the selected response), and then provide evidence to support their answer. On a printed test, you often give students a second multiple-choice question: which statement provides evidence for your answer in Part A?
At Victory Productions, we are pushing the envelope on TEIs for ELA, without going too far. We don’t want to lose the teacher or the student along the way. We developed a prototype TEI, and we’d love to hear what you think—please watch the video below and use the comments to give us your feedback. Keep in mind that this a work in progress, which makes your feedback extremely valuable. You can also play with the prototype TEI here.
Note that the log of student actions is for the developer; the student wouldn’t see it. Instead of conducting market research with focus groups, it’s now possible to get anonymous data from every user, then use analytics to cluster the results, and in this way find out what students are really thinking and how they are using your TEIs. From there, it’s a much shorter step to improving them! If you want to find out more about how and why we instrument TEIs, visit the website of our new spin-off, metacog.
