Embedded assessment means an assessment that is contained within a pedagogical item. An implicit assessment is embedded and unknown to the learner.
Paul Horowitz contends that assessment is what defines school. Going to the roller coaster and talking about F=MA is a field trip. Getting information out of students is what sets school apart and it's an important focus in developing educational technology.
(Nate) interesting terminology; some thoughts:
- assessment is what an instructor does. that is, look at some data that the student has created. This seems core to me, because in an SAIL-like system, all kinds of data will be stored – everything the student does that the machine knows about – and will potentially be available to the instructor for assessment. (The potential part comes from a social contract, not a technical issue. In certain situations, students may be guaranteed that their work will not be assessed).
- so, I need a term for the thing that the student does. Might as well use 'quiz', even though that generally takes a certain form, and 'assessments' as terms in the first sentence of this page can be of many forms.
- So, in the SAIL world, everything is a potential quiz. All pieces of a unit gather data.
- a student may not know that a step is a potential 'quiz', but in our brave new world this shouldn't happen (for long). The student should realize that everything is gathering data on him/her, in potential. This is the 'implicit' term above.
- the teacher and student have agreed that data generated from the step won't be assessed. A related issue is that the data won't be used to form a grade on the student, but may be looked at.
- the teacher doesn't ever do assessment with the data – this will happen very often in data rich learning environments. Some wrinkles: the teacher never intended to look at the data, but wanted the student to think that s/he might.
- as data is composed it will be harder to define when something is 'looked at'.
- The form of the data that is gathered in one step is different than the form of the data gathered in another. Duh. This, coupled with issues like reliability, validity, etc, will make it that most steps that are used for "assessment" have the traditional form.
- embeddedness is kinda tricky. To me it means that this step takes place in a 'unit' in which learning is ostensibly taking place. The unit isn't a final exam, say, which is purely evaluative. What does it mean to 'take place in a unit', though (not speaking technically, here). The course as a whole should have learning, certainly, and assessments, so 'unit' has to be smaller than that to make sense. Where there is a distinct 'quiz' step sandwiched betweeen to evidence pages, that quiz step can still be looked at as purely evaluative, eventhough it would be called embedded. So, I guess unit has to be bigger than the single step. There are grey areas, anyway. Still, an webscheme/interactive step within which the student is testing hypotheses, etc (i.e., learning) can serve as an assessment, so that is truly embedded, but a better term might be dual-use. That is, the single step both serves a learning and an evaluative function and the two can't be separated out.