Industries
Education
Digitizing education for blended and immersive learning experiences
Highlights
- Formative assessments drive deeper learning, help students and teachers track progress chapter-by-chapter, enabling timely feedback and targeted improvements in learning.
- Traditional pen-and-paper assessments slow down result sharing, increasing teacher workload and limiting timely support for students and parents.
- Digital assessments offer scalable, efficient solutions. Technology enables secure, customizable, and real-time assessments, making learning data instantly available to all stakeholders for better decision-making.
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Overview
Education is a key factor playing a critical role in development.
It is crucial that students receive a quality education and diagnostic feedback throughout their learning journey, irrespective of their grades.
While elementary education plays a vital role in laying the foundation, higher education builds on that base, preparing them for successful entry into their professional careers. Their journey between these two end points of education is critical and needs to be nurtured.
For teachers, it is important to understand how effective their instruction has been in the classroom, which is only possible when students’ learning is measured as soon as the chapters are completed by the teachers using formative assessments. These formative assessments are generally recommended to assess the learning after each chapter as the chapters are arranged with incremental complexity of logical sequence. This cycle continues throughout the year.
Formative assessment helps students see how well they are understanding and communicating course concepts, what they might be missing, and how they can improve and deepen their learning. This is a crucial part of learning process.[i]
This entire process supports teachers, students and parents as well as strengthening schools with evidence-based assessment practices.
Data Driven Approach
Formative assessments are only effective when supported by a data-driven approach to assess students, where the data is used to accurately understand students’ learning progress.
This approach is essential, as it helps identify students who need immediate additional support to better understand concepts. The information obtained can help in identifying teaching and learning patterns at both the classroom and school levels throughout the year.
Research indicates that teachers who utilize data to assess learning contribute significantly to improving both student outcomes and teaching practices, ultimately enhancing overall school performance and capacity. This approach not only supports broader educational reforms by elevating the status of education and educators but also enables teachers to respond more effectively and with greater focus to the diverse needs of their students. [i]
Teachers must skilfully ensure that learning is taking place in the classroom. Therefore, it is important that they engage students and develop their interest in the chapter before they introduce it to students.
Creating such awareness helps students to understand what they are going to learn from the chapter and what efforts are required from them to ensure that the learning objectives of that chapter are met. To understand whether the students’ learning is aligned with the learning outcomes, they require feedback and this can only be given when their learning is assessed by conducting a formative assessment. From the teachers and students’ perspective, it is important that they know where they are on the learning path throughout the year. If students have immediate feedback, it can help them correct their errors and focus on attention required to learn the concepts. If teachers have information on students’ performance, they can plan their teaching instruction to reduce the gap in students’ knowledge.
[i] Using data to improve learning by Anthony Shaddock, published by Australian Council for Educational Research
Manual Assessments
In many schools, formative assessments are still carried out manually using pen and paper.
Students submit written responses, which are then evaluated by teachers who assign marks and translate them into grades. This traditional method is time-consuming and places a significant workload on teachers. Consequently, feedback is often delayed, which hampers timely identification of learning gaps. By the time students receive feedback, the class may have already progressed to a new chapter, limiting their chance to revisit and address areas of difficulty.
If there is a group of schools and management wishes to compare the progress across all schools, they may not immediately be able to as the manual process of data collection and interpretation delays reporting significantly. As a result, they may not be able adopt standard instructions across schools.
It is also possio ble that conducting a formative assessment after each chapter may confuse students if results are not promptly shared, which makes it more difficult for management to gauge their learning levels.
Parents have a key role to play in formative assessments as timely communication with teachers is essential to support student learning. However, manual assessments delay result sharing, limiting parents' ability to help their children effectively at home.
Due to the pressure of completing the syllabus within fixed timelines, teachers often struggle to dedicate time for thorough assessment and feedback.
Assessments & Tech
In this technology-driven era, education is undergoing scalable transformation, and examinations are a key area where digital advancements have met expectations, especially in higher education.
One notable success in higher education is the digital transformation of recruitment examinations. This shift has significantly reduced the overall duration of the examination process and enhanced its transparency.
Candidates now benefit from a more convenient experience. They can apply for multiple jobs online using their laptops or computers, without standing in long queues at banks for fee payments or visiting post offices to collect hall tickets and results. These are just instances of the many advantages brought about by the integration of technology in examinations. IT firms have played a pivotal role in driving this digital transformation, making the examination process faster, more efficient, and more accessible.
While higher education has greatly benefited from digital transformation, schools continue to face challenges in digitizing. Several factors hinder this advancement, with cost being a dominant concern. As school education becomes increasingly expensive, institutions may hesitate to adopt technology for assessments, fearing that the added cost could be passed on to students through higher fees.
Currently, many schools still rely on traditional methods for conducting both formative and summative assessments, with teachers administering pen-and-paper tests. On one hand, schools need to explore ways to integrate technology into their assessment systems; on the other, IT firms must revisit their strategies and offer affordable, scalable solutions tailored to the needs and constraints of school-level education.
Pen-Paper vs. Digital
Digital assessments offer a scalable, secure, and efficient alternative to traditional pen-paper methods, streamlining the entire workflow from planning to feedback.
They reduce manual effort, enable real-time insights, and enhance learning outcomes for students, teachers, and school leaders.
A comparison between manual formative assessments and technology driven formative assessments can be seen as under:
Figure 1:
A hub and spoke diagram for formative assessments
Figure 1:
Workflow stages |
Pen-Paper Assessment |
Digital Assessments |
Possible Benefits |
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1. Planning, Design and Development |
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Assessment Blueprint |
Development and finalization done in sequential order |
Provide flexibility and customization of different stakeholders at the same time from different locations. |
· Makes the process dynamic, error free, collaborative and scalable with an ease to document following security measures.
· Provides a secure, comprehensive question bank covering the entire syllabus, reducing repeated effort in question each year
· Enables unlimited creation of customized question sets, providing students with immediate feedback aligned to the learning objectives of each chapter.
· Allows generation of randomized tests across multiple chapters, enabling teachers to assess student learning at desired intervals.
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Assessment Design and Development |
Questions are prepared on paper, printed later that consumes a huge volume of paper and imposes security risk. |
Questions are created using digital platforms ensuring high security measures. |
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Assessment customization |
Fixed sets per student or group give limited options for randomization. |
Dynamic randomization, branching, adaptive logic possible. |
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2. Assessment Administration |
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Distribution |
Printed copies of test are distributed to students in the classroom. |
Test links or login credentials are shared electronically. |
· Eliminates the need of physical storage and distribution of question papers, reducing logistical effort, while students access assessment securely on preconfigured digital devices. |
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Environment |
Classroom or exam hall. |
Computer lab, tablets, or remote access. |
· Enables assessment to be accessed from any location, using AI to monitor the testing environment, prevent cheating, and restrict unauthorized engagement among students. |
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Monitoring |
Teacher invigilates in person. |
May include auto-proctoring, screen locks, webcam monitoring etc. |
· Reduces the teacher’s proctoring burden, with technology – configured devices automatically locking upon detection of any unethical behavior.
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3. Students’ Responses |
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Question format |
Written text, diagrams, MCQs shaded manually. |
Typing, clicking options, drag & drop, voice/text inputs and several other options for marking the responses. |
· Offers multiple ways to frame questions to effectively assess students’ learning, while automated evaluation reduces the burden of scoring for each student.
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Time tracking |
Generally done by teacher who acts as an invigilator. |
Automatic tracking with timestamps. |
· Preconfigured devices automatically track assessment duration, relieving teachers from manual monitoring time for each student. |
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4. Evaluation & Scoring |
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Response capture and processing |
The answer sheets are collected manually by teachers and then marking done manually for student responses. |
Responses are auto captured and data processing done automatically |
· The digital platform records and securely stores student responses, which are then used for scoring and analysis. |
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Grading |
Manually checked by teacher. |
Automatic grading and remote evaluation by evaluators for questions. |
· The system grades students based on their raw scores, significantly reducing teachers’ workload and allowing them to focus on other academic tasks. |
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5. Analysis and Insights: |
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Data/result compilation |
Requires manual collation and analysis. |
Instant analytics on scores, time, topic-wise performance that gives more diagnostic information to students and the teachers. |
· The system compiles assessment data using teacher-defined templates, generating reports that provide clear insights into students’ learning levels. |
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6. Feedback to Stakeholders |
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Assessment reporting |
Time consuming, prone to errors, and limited accessibility. |
Instant, accurate, secure, and easily accessible with deep analytics that provide comprehensive feedback on student learning levels. |
· The system generates reports aligned with assessment objectives, accessible securely through personalized credentials by teachers, parents and school leaders. |
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Conclusion
To make formative assessment truly effective in schools, it is essential to ensure that students can gauge their learning progress at key milestones throughout the academic year, and that teachers can assess the effectiveness of their teaching methods.
Timely feedback on student performance,= ideally after the completion of each chapter, is critical in this process. The integration of technology and the digital transformation of formative assessments not only streamline their implementation and reduce manual effort but also enhance the process by addressing the core components of formative assessment.
Schools must adopt a data-driven approach to identify learning gaps and empower teachers to devise appropriate interventions. Although the digital transformation of formative assessment may initially appear complex and costly, it is a one-time investment that can offer long-term benefits across the academic ecosystem. Just as infrastructure is essential to ensure a conducive learning environment, digitizing formative assessments is equally important. It enables faster data collection on student learning, making progress more visible and actionable for all stakeholders.