There is a simple rule at the heart of practical assessment: if you’re assessing a skill, you have to see the student do it. 

Knowledge assessment and skill assessment are not interchangeable. If we are assessing knowledge, the student must tell us something. If we are assessing a skill, we have to watch them perform it — or examine the product they have created, whether that is the dish they cooked, the report they wrote, or the thing they built. A student explaining how they would do something is not evidence that they can do it. Questioning can give you evidence of knowledge, but questioning on its own can almost never give you evidence of skill that meets the Rules of Evidence. 

Did you know there is a digital divide in Australia? Despite the many advances in technology, there is a divide between those who can afford access to digital devices and those who cannot. Learn more about the disparities this gap creates and what can be done to help bridge it.

As technology continues to evolve, it is changing the way we learn and do business. We have seen massive advancements over the last few years with artificial intelligence (AI), particularly with chatbots that are powered by natural language processing (NLP) algorithms such as GPT3 and GPT4. But how does this technology apply to education? Are teachers and students taking advantage of these tools? And how can educators ensure that their students are writing their own work and not using AI to generate it? Let’s explore these questions further.