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Speaker: Data-driven instruction and digital assessment. How can digital tools enhance assessment?

Lila Young: My name is Lila Young. I am a CTE career technical education business instructor. I'm also the department chair as well as the webmaster at Clovis Adult Education at Clovis, California. I know many of our students have grown up in the education system memorizing the answer. And to develop critical thinking, it's hard. My strategy in assessing students is constant. It's every day. So when students are online, I look at tools to help students or help me to better assess the students.

Ryan De La Vega: My name is Ryan De La Vega. My title is ESL resource teacher. So I'm the lead of the department. And I work at Torrance Adult School in Torrance, California. Digital learning has impacted assessment, I think, in a more efficient way because now as far as courses pre and post, we have the e-test, teachers can get their competency report and see where the students are needing more help in instruction. And as far as if you wanted to do a quick formative assessment, you can use some of the websites, gamified websites for quizzes to quickly do a comprehension check and see if they got the objective of the day.

Yecsenia Delgado Lorenzo: My name is Yecsenia Delgado Lorenzo, and I am a counselor and instructor at Hacienda La Puente Adult School. Some of the tools that we use to assess learners are going to be game-based applications that are web based. And the reason why I like to use those is because they provide real time feedback so that learners are able to play the game and then I can see exactly where they're at so we can review the questions that they missed or we can take a look at whether we want to come back into the content and restudy it or whether they're ready to move on.

Speaker: How can assessment data inform instruction?

Lila Young: You have a student go through a concept and you assess. And if the student is successful in answering that question, they move forward. But if the student was not successful, they gave the wrong answer, my strategy has been give them a hint and then go back and review the assessment and then ask the question again and see if they were successful. At two or three tries, the third try the student is having difficulty now is the time to talk to the student.

Oscar Medina: I am Oscar Medina. I'm with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. And there I am a supervisor of correctional education programs with the office of correctional education. With increased access to technology, what we hope to see is a greater interactivity between the teacher and the student.

So not only are they using the embedded assessments within the various tools, but the teacher hopefully at one point will be able to conduct an informal assessment on the fly through the computers, through the interactive whiteboard and get an immediate gauge of the extent to which a student is understanding what they're doing. Technology will allow that to be more seamless in terms of direct instruction to student discourse, to showing whether they understand it or not.

With a typical type of instruction in most classrooms, a teacher will ask a question to the entire class and ask for volunteers. Well, in that case, you're going to get the student who knows the material, who knows the content, and is willing to participate. So chances are you're going to get the same three, four students who will always respond and you don't have an idea where these students sitting in the corner over here actually understands or is even engaged.

So with the technology, everybody's on the level playing field. Everybody has access to a computer and should be able to interact and the teacher will be able to determine whether or not every student has responded. So technology will ensure that more students are engaged. It will allow the teacher to collect that information much more quickly and more smoothly so that the teacher can respond to it to either reteach, move on, or continue with the lesson as planned.

Speaker: Development of the guidance was made possible by the California Department of Education, Adult Education Office through Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act Title II funds. The videos were produced by the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network at Sacramento County Office of Education in partnership with the International Society for Technology and Education.

To find more resources for implementing digital learning in adult education, please visit the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network website at otan.us.

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