Universally Designed Online Assessment: Implications for the Future‪.‬

UNIVERSALLY DESIGNED ONLINE ASSESSMENT TOOLS In the growing field of Universal Design, online assessment should play an expanded role. Wiggins (1998) defines assessment as a deliberate use of many methods to obtain evidence to indicate if students are meeting standards. Evidence is gathered in formal and informal assessment including observations, dialogues, traditional quizzes and tests and performance tasks and projects along with student self-assessments. Online assessment has begun to emerge as a new tool that will impact student instruction and assessment. Currently the dimensions identified by Wiggins are not prevalent in online assessment tools available to teachers due to technological and theoretical limitations. Many of the premier online assessment vendors offer only rudimentary, machine scored true/false, or multiple-choice responses with automatic feedback or essay storage without scoring. Little research has been done to integrate the deep knowledge base we have of learning and assessment into future online assessment tools. Online assessment tools offer educators new ways to impact learning, by accessing the rich pool of student results stored in these relational databases. When paired with dynamic assessment models integrated into the online assessment tools, the representation of assessment data in rich formats using multiple forms of presentation and media can be used to meet individual learning styles. Royal (2003) advocates a method termed "Computer Adaptive Testing (CATS)" that allows the computer to custom design tests to meet the individual ability level of each student to measure progress verses the more static print-based norm or criterion measures currently used.