This book is about the current state of research in online assessment. The growth of this field is set to accelerate exponentially with emerging opportunities for automatic data collection and analysis. Yet, the future of online assessment faces major challenges including, perhaps most importantly, the extent to which assessments, when enabled by technology, can serve simultaneously the needs of learners, teachers and those of the enterprise of education. This book details, specifically, the multiple ways in which online assessment can be utilized, such as: Providing virtual coaching or tutoring Offering appropriate scaffolding Allowing analysis of student decision-making Providing the mechanism for students to review and comment on each others digital creations Creating a space for online discussion Providing expert coaching for modeling and animation work With the increased availability of vast and highly varied amounts of data from learners, teachers, learning environments, and administrative systems within educational settings, further opportunities arise for advancing pedagogical assessment practice (Ifenthaler et al., 2018). This book fully details these opportunities, as well as privileges and constraints of analytics-enhanced assessment, harnessing formative as well as summative data from learners and their contexts in order to facilitate learning processes in near real-time and help decisionmakers to improve learning environments.

Formative Assessment, Learning Data Analytics and Gamification: An ICT Education discusses the challenges associated with assessing student progress given the explosion of e-learning environments, such as MOOCs and online courses that incorporate activities such as design and modeling. This book shows educators how to effectively garner intelligent data from online educational environments that combine assessment and gamification. This data, when used effectively, can have a positive impact on learning environments and be used for building learner profiles, community building, and as a tactic to create a collaborative team. Using numerous illustrative examples and theoretical and practical results, leading international experts discuss application of automatic techniques for e-assessment of learning activities, methods to collect, analyze, and correctly visualize learning data in educational environments, applications, benefits and challenges of using gamification techniques in academic contexts, and solutions and strategies for increasing student participation and performance. - Discusses application of automatic techniques for e-assessment of learning activities - Presents strategies to provide immediate and useful feedback on students' activities - Provides methods to collect, analyze, and correctly visualize learning data in educational environments - Explains the applications, benefits, and challenges of using gamification techniques in academic contexts - Offers solutions to increase students' participation and performance while lowering drop-out rates and retention levels

The general theme of this book is to encourage the use of relevant methodology in data mining which is or could be applied to the interplay of education, statistics and computer science to solve psychometric issues and challenges in the new generation of assessments. In addition to item response data, other data collected in the process of assessment and learning will be utilized to help solve psychometric challenges and facilitate learning and other educational applications. Process data include those collected or available for collection during the process of assessment and instructional phase such as responding sequence data, log files, the use of help features, the content of web searches, etc. Some book chapters present the general exploration of process data in large-scale assessment. Further, other chapters also address how to integrate psychometrics and learning analytics in assessment and survey, how to use data mining techniques for security and cheating detection, how to use more assessment results to facilitate student’s learning and guide teacher’s instructional efforts. The book includes both theoretical and methodological presentations that might guide the future in this area, as well as illustrations of efforts to implement big data analytics that might be instructive to those in the field of learning and psychometrics. The context of the effort is diverse, including K-12, higher education, financial planning, and survey utilization. It is hoped that readers can learn from different disciplines, especially those who are specialized in assessment, would be critical to expand the ideas of what we can do with data analytics for informing assessment practices.

E-assessments of students profoundly influence their motivation and play a key role in the educational process. Adapting assessment techniques to current technological advancements allows for effective pedagogical practices, learning processes, and student engagement. The Handbook of Research on E-Assessment in Higher Education provides emerging perspectives on the theoretical and practical aspects of digital assessment techniques and applications within educational settings. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as competency assessment, adaptive courseware, and learning performance, this publication is ideally designed for educational administrators, educational professionals, teachers and professors, researchers, and graduate-level students seeking current research on comparative studies and the pedagogical issues of online assessment in academic institutions.

Technology has increasingly become utilized in classroom settings in order to allow students to enhance their experiences and understanding. Among such technologies that are being implemented into course work are game-based learning programs. Introducing game-based learning into the classroom can help to improve students’ communication and teamwork skills and build more meaningful connections to the subject matter. While this growing field has numerous benefits for education at all levels, it is important to understand and acknowledge the current best practices of gamification and game-based learning and better learn how they are correctly implemented in all areas of education. The Research Anthology on Developments in Gamification and Game-Based Learning is a comprehensive reference source that considers all aspects of gamification and game-based learning in an educational context including the benefits, difficulties, opportunities, and future directions. Covering a wide range of topics including game concepts, mobile learning, educational games, and learning processes, it is an ideal resource for academicians, researchers, curricula developers, instructional designers, technologists, IT specialists, education professionals, administrators, software designers, students, and stakeholders in all levels of education.

This book A Beginner’s Guide to Learning Analytics is designed to meet modern educational trends’ needs. It is addressed to readers who have no prior knowledge of learning analytics and functions as an introductory text to learning analytics for those who want to do more with evaluation/assessment in their organizations. The book is useful to all who need to evaluate their learning and teaching strategies. It aims to bring greater efficiency and deeper engagement to individual students, learning communities, and educators. Covered here are the key concepts linked to learning analytics for researchers and practitioners interested in learning analytics. This book helps those who want to apply analytics to learning and development programs and helps educational institutions to identify learners who require support and provide a more personalized learning experience. Like chapters show diverse uses of learning analytics to enhance student and faculty performance. It presents a coherent framework for the effective translation of learning analytics research for educational practice to its practical application in different educational domains. This book provides educators and researchers with the tools and frameworks to effectively make sense of and use data and analytics in their everyday practice. This book will be a valuable addition to researchers’ bookshelves.

This book focuses on interim and formative assessments as distinguished from the more usual interest in summative assessment. I was particularly interested in seeing what the experts have to say about a full system of assessment. This book has particular interest in what information a teacher, a school or even a state could collect that monitors the progress of a student as he or she learns. The authors were asked to think about assessing the effects of teaching and learning throughout the student’s participation in the curriculum. This book is the product of a conference by the Maryland Assessment Research Center for Education Success (MARCES) with funding from the Maryland State Department of Education.

This edited volume fills the gaps in existing literature on visualization and dashboard design for learning analytics. To do so, it presents critical tips to stakeholders and acts as guide to efficient implementation. The book covers the following topics: visualization and dashboard design for learning analytics, visualization and dashboard preferences of stakeholders, learners’ patterns on the dashboard, usability of visualization techniques and the dashboard, dashboard and intervention design, learning and instructional design for learning analytics, privacy and security issues about the dashboard, and future directions of visualization and dashboard design. This book will be of interest to researchers with interest in learning analytics and data analytics, teachers and students in higher education institutions and instructional designers, as it includes contributions from a wide variety of educational and psychological researchers, engineers, instructional designers, learning scientists, and computer scientists interested in learning analytics.

In education today, technology alone doesn't always lead to immediate success for students or institutions. In order to gauge the efficacy of educational technology, we need ways to measure the efficacy of educational practices in their own right. Through a better understanding of how learning takes place, we may work toward establishing best practices for students, educators, and institutions. These goals can be accomplished with learning analytics. Learning Analytics: From Research to Practice updates this emerging field with the latest in theories, findings, strategies, and tools from across education and technological disciplines. Guiding readers through preparation, design, and examples of implementation, this pioneering reference clarifies LA methods as not mere data collection but sophisticated, systems-based analysis with practical applicability inside the classroom and in the larger world. Case studies illustrate applications of LA throughout academic settings (e.g., intervention, advisement, technology design), and their resulting impact on pedagogy and learning. The goal is to bring greater efficiency and deeper engagement to individual students, learning communities, and educators, as chapters show diverse uses of learning analytics to: Enhance student and faculty performance. Improve student understanding of course material. Assess and attend to the needs of struggling learners. Improve accuracy in grading. Allow instructors to assess and develop their own strengths. Encourage more efficient use of resources at the institutional level. Researchers and practitioners in educational technology, IT, and the learning sciences will hail the information in Learning Analytics: From Research to Practice as a springboard to new levels of student, instructor, and institutional success.