Tech Transfer: Student Assessment Tool

Guests: Richard Young, Professor of Education at BYU; Lynnette Christensen, Researcher in the Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education & Schooling; Mike Alder, Director of BYU’s Technology Transfer office  “Assessment” is both a buzzword and a thorny challenge in education. We want to know how well students are doing in school. We need to know if teachers are helping kids mastering the skills we expect. In the last decade, end-of-year tests at certain grade levels have become the standard for assessing student performance. Many parents and teachers now says we’ve gone too far – made the testing stakes too high.  Imagine, instead, if teachers had a kind of dashboard that could show them day by day how well their students were doing on math or science or reading assignments. At any given moment, a teacher could see which students are struggling, which skills are giving lots of kids trouble and so on.