This document discusses the importance of educational assessment in developing effective ICT-based educational solutions. It makes three key points: 1) Existing ICT initiatives have been isolated and fragmented, focusing on infrastructure without supporting teachers and students to effectively use new technologies. As a result, many projects ended after piloting. 2) For ICT solutions to improve learning outcomes, they must be developed in cooperation with educational psychologists and be informed by theories of cognitive development and learning. Solutions need to assess students' skills and knowledge and adapt accordingly. 3) Educational assessment should be theoretically grounded, multi-level, longitudinal, and methodologically diverse to understand the complex interaction between individual and environmental factors influencing development. Properly designed

1. Educational psychology –
challenges and possibilities of
assessment
Grete Arro
Research fellow in Institute of Pscychology and Educational Innovation
Centre, Tallinn University

2. ICT in education – highway to the better
future. (Indeed)
ICT in education - new technologies, innovative learning- and
teaching methods, digital content
-> More up-to-date and open educational space will result in
high-quality and effective education ->
-> impacts to economy, international competitiveness, better
skilled workers
Digital techology integrated into all aspects of our life except
education
(SWD 2013 341 final)

3. But also…
- The potential impact ICT educational solutions and digital
content is widely recognized
- Several ICT-based learning initiatives are started
- However - initiatives have been isolated and fragmented
- Investments to the infrastructure often do not bring along
the ability and motivation of teachers and students to use
them
- Thus, many projects have ended after the piloting phase
(SWD 2013 341 final)

4. - Learning, like every behavior, occurs in interaction between
individual and environment
- The effectiveness of learning is related to the ability of the
learning environment (whether it be the teacher or ICT-
solution) to specify the current level of ability/ skills/
knowledge/ motivation/ attitudes of the learner and design an
appropriate learning context
- The ICT-tool itself does not do anything, if it does not
„understand“ cognitive development and adapt to the
developmental level and specific learning difficulties of the
learner; but it can be developed in a „developmentally
informed“ way
Why assessment is important

5. Detecting and addressing learning difficulties – problems in
all levels from basic processes to complex ones – is what
the new tools ought to do (and this mindset is one of the
secrets behind the Finnish educational miracle, too)
Pedagogical philosophy and practice:
The school is there for every child and the school must
adjust to the needs of each child, not the other way
around (Aro et al., 2011) – this ought to be the leading
motive of ICT-solutions as well  addressing that idea
assumes that ICT educational solutions are developed in
(furious) cooperation with cognitive psychologists and
teachers
What and how to assess comes before designing the new and
shiny educational solutions
…to avoid the situation „Whe have a spaceship here! Let’s
fly to somewhere!“

6. Examples of what I’m talking about:
A game for helping children learning to read

7. …even more examples:
learning compex things with a system that follows your
reasoning process

8. …adaptively foster self-regulated learning

9. …use the adaptive comparative marking to judge the
performance

10. …or help children with attention problems

11. The fundamental focus of educational research
- Development occurs in the interaction of individual and
environmental factors
- In order to understand (optimal) development, both types of
factors need to be studied, as well as their joint impact

12. (Aro et al., 2011; Melzer, 1996)

13. Thus – educational assessment needs to be:
- theoretically oriented – in our case: cultural-historical, constructivistic
- structural-systemic – as we need to understand the new emerging
wholes
- multi-levelled – as there are aspects affecting the child on individual and
on group/class/school level
- longitudinal – as development is understandable only when the change
in important variables is observed
- methodologically diverse – cognitive ability tests, standardized self-
report scales, open-ended questionnaires, experimental methods etc
…which is the case in our research projects

14. Examples of the projects
Project SHTHK06126 „Effectiveness of Estonian primary school“ (2006-
2009)
Project RU/2712 „Bilingual child in Estonian school“ (2009-2014)
Project S10012 „General competencies and their assessment“ (2011-2014)
Project KA/8914 „Developing Test Battery for Assessing Basic School
Students’ Psychological Processes and Educating Support Specialists“
(2014-2016)
…and many others

15. Assessment sounds nice, but why talk about it in the
context of ICT in education?
- Development of psychological processes is not directly observable in the
classroom – it is difficult or impossible for the teacher to observe
motivational, cognitive, or executive processes
- Thus, learning difficulties or -deficits may remain unattended and the
respective functions or processes will not be developed
- ICT-based educational assessment/learning solutions might help in real
time to find out the problems in different levels of complexity – from
basic cognitive processes (e.g. working memory), executive functioning
(e.g., planning, effort regulation), learning strategies (organizing
information for memorizing), or motivation (indirectly or self-assessed) -
in case the developer of the digital solution knows, what is important to
measure.

16. - Adaptive testing/learning vs traditional classroom – if some process is
difficult for the learner, moving on and leaving the problem unaddressed
is a problem.
- If practicing, offered by the adaptive digital solution, does not work (e.g.
because of some neurological problem), the child may get help earlier as
the tool may act as a preliminary diagnostic device and inform the
adult/teacher about it.

17. Conclusions
all this is well-known;
there are numerous ICT-based assessment tools and learning environments
developed;
However, most of the classrooms are still „traditional“, both in the sense of
ICT tools and in being developmentally sensible
As in-depth and complex educational ICT-based assessment assumes a
number of different topics and research questions to be addressed,
cooperation between research institutions would be recommended in
order not to remain fragmented

18. Benefits of educational psychology research in TLU
- Research group with very different and indepth research interests and
experience in cognitive processes, motivation, general competencies
- Experience in complex (child-school-teacher-parent) and longitudinal
educational research projects
- Size matters - it is easy to achieve the representative sample of
schoolchildren in a small country like Estonia
- Size matters once again – nothing is there yet - no fixed governmental
educational assessment system -> possibility to build it up flexibly
- Relatively reasonable research funding system
- A lot of internet everywhere!

19. Thank you
If you want to discuss interesting stuff, please contact arro@tlu.ee or skype
gretearro