The future of assessment: five principles, five targets for 2025

Assessment is crucial to the educational process. Done properly, it drives improvement, shapes learner behaviour and provides accountability to employers and others. 

It can also be a source of dissatisfaction, frustration and anxiety. Does it assess the right things? Is it getting the best from learners? Does it take place at the right points in the learning journey? Is it susceptible to cheating? Does it involve a sustainable workload?

Existing and emerging technologies are starting to play a role in changing assessment and could help address these issues, both today and looking into the future. The vision for Education 4.0 is to make assessment smarter, faster, fairer and more effective.

The report sets five targets for the next five years to progress assessment towards being more authentic, accessible, appropriately automated, continuous and secure.

• Authentic

Assessments designed to prepare students for what they do next, using technology they will use in their careers

• Accessible

Assessments designed with an accessibility-first principle

• Appropriately automated

A balance found of automated and human marking to deliver maximum benefit to students

• Continuous

Assessment data used to explore opportunities for continuous assessment to improve the learning experience

• Secure

Authoring detection and biometric authentication adopted for identification and remote proctoring