Disruptive Assessment

The new book, Disrupting Class, written by Clayton Christensen, author of Silicon Valley bible The Innovator's Dilemma, is getting a lot of attention for its projections that half of all high school courses could be online by 2019. (Education Next has an article summarizing the book.) Beyond this headline, though, is a much more fundamental and interesting prediction.

Christensen and his co-authors Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson suggest a two-step process for the disruptive change they foresee. The first step is the current version of online learning, in which they highlight companies like Apex Learning and public providers such as Florida Virtual School. But, the eventual focus of the disruptive cycle is a wholesale change to "student centric learning," highly personalized learning facilitated by powerful cognitive tutors and technology applications. In the book, the authors are wise to make the not necessarily obvious connection with assessment.

With the change to student-centric learning, assessment--the art and science of testing children to determine what they have learned--can and should change, as well. Student-centric learning should, over time, obviate the need for examinations as we have known them. Alternative means of comparison, when necessary, will emerge.

They don't use these terms, but essentially what they describe is a very powerful, technology-aided formative assessment and instructional approach, under girded by well-defined cognitive models and learning progressions. It's the place where digital media offers the most opportunity and the truly disruptive approach.

Assessment offers a critical connection in Christensen's disruptive cycle between the first phase, online learning, and the second phase, student-centric learning. Since online learning already takes place in a digital environment, and, perhaps more importantly, it is not constrained to a particular pace or time, it provides an immense opportunity to embed technology-enabled formative assessment throughout instruction. New types of assessment tools, simulations, and games that capture a wide variety of descriptive formative data are many times a distraction or add-on in the traditional classroom environment. But, they can and should play a central and critical role in the online learning environment.

Disruptive assessment, driven by continued research and applications of cognitive science and technology, is the big opportunity.