MIT Researchers Developing Playful Assessments to Upgrade The Standardized Test Ways

In this changing era, teachers want to be innovative and use the technology to their benefit and to understand the nature and strength of a student to make growth in the society. Some  education researchers have spent countless collective hours designing, experimenting with and implementing the new way of learning which may be the best experiences for students as everybody knows that learning methods that are fun, engaging and malleable.

Still the standard assessments didn’t change yet and stands at the same place. Which therefore brings the outcome of a line that separates what schools stresses and what they count. But that brings a lack as schools are unable to test the exact knowledge because sometimes students have a much better knowledge then what they write at the assessment tests. Louisa Rosenheck, MIT research manager quoted a statement on this concept that “By making assessment playful, we can get closer to measuring the things we actually value.” That’s why a team of education researchers in the MIT took up on an ambitious project to figure out the missing link measuring outcomes that so often holds back new-age learning environments. They’re calling it “playful assessment.” Playful assessment is not something like playing a game, rather it seeks to capture the student mastery over all the field to perform best of it can. Louisa Rosenheck, a research manager at MIT has thereafter developed in game design and configure it to be an idea of measuring “all the things we say we care about like curiosity, critical thinking, creativity By making assessment playful, we can get closer to measure the knowledge we actually value,” they explained the importance of playful assessment, that it can be easily done without hampering the system of normal learning, thereby alleviating student anxiety around testing. The Researchers there at MIT Teaching Systems Lab (TSL) has been working for long to develop the playful assessment method, but only surfaced it the last year. In that time, they’ve pursued a few distinct variety of this work; this includes the development of a thing called playful activity so as to help teachers build better rubrics and the implementation of a basic plan for playful assessment in schools. Another MIT researcher, Yoon Jeon Kim quoted that “Playful assessment is a punch to that notion of assessment being so grave. I think it could flourish the way how schooling is done.”

By: Anuja Arora

Content: https://www.edsurge.com/amp/news/2018-12-10-is-assessment-ready-to-move-beyond-standardized-tests-these-mit-researchers-think-so