Most Innovative use of Technology in Assessment Award 2021

Kindly sponsored by Vretta

In September 2019, colleagues at Bolton College embarked on a tentative journey to discover if a computer could be trained to support teachers to assess student responses to an open-ended question; and if real-time feedback improved the quality of student work when responding to such a question.
Bolton College discovered that if we make use of natural language classification, natural language understanding and other tools a computer can indeed be taught to analyse and assess responses to an open-ended question. It is also possible to offer textual and graphical real-time feedback to students.
The work undertaken by Bolton College also enables teachers to create multiple classification models that can be used to support the formative assessment of numerous open-ended questions.
The emergence of this new assessment tool enables teachers to make use of a richer medium for assessing their students. Traditionally, online formative assessment activities are undertaken using closed questioning techniques such as yes/no questions, multiple-choice questions or drag-and-drop activities. Whilst valuable, this is a rather narrow way to undertake formative assessment. This new solution enables teachers to pose open-ended questions which can be automatically analysed and assessed by a computer

Download the 2021 Most Innovative Use of Technology in Assessment and Best Transformational Project Finalists and Winners Brochure