Evaluation of Technology Learning

     The standard student evaluation of learning must change. This is justified by the fact that not only has the new generation changed into digital learners, but the traditional world has metamorphosed into a digital world.  As efforts are exerted to go digital in instruction, we need to also go digital in learning assessment.  Assessment needs to conform, not with the literacy of the past century but the new literacy of the 21st century.  This is a literacy that uses digital tools in preparing students to face a high-tech world.  The comparison is made Swiss watch-makers which fail to adapt to digital watch-making. The Swiss watch lost its prime position in less than two years of neglect to the need to go digital.

      Teachers must adopt a new mind set both for instruction and evaluation.  Evaluation must be geared to assessment of essential knowledge and skills so that learners can function effectively, productively and creatively in a new world.  It must evaluative tools that measure the new basic skills of the 21st century digital culture, namely: solution fluency, information fluency, creative fluency, media fluency and digital citizenship.

      The above six fluencies reflect process skills.  In reading, for example, single text reading becomes less important compared with the empowerment process of being imbibed by varied informative, educational and recreational literature – textual, audio-visual, and digital.  Apart from reading, learners are asked to engage in the process of writing reports, essays, articles, stories, power-point presentation, video scripts, drama skits etc.  The standard paper tests will prove in adequate in assessing new learning.  As students engage in the problem-solving process, assessment will also need to focus on the 4Ds (define, design, do, debrief) that empower students to solve problems using higher-level theoretical and practical thinking.  As product-outcome learning changes from verbal-textual to digital expressions (research-based outputs in various forms such as audio, video, power-point, multimedia, etc.) evaluation must also change.