A Futuristic Look at Assessing Learning

“How do we enhance cognition?” Dr. Adam Gazzaley, who spoke at our 2017 BrainFutures Conference, is working relentlessly to find out. Gazzaley has identified key areas where he feels our education system is lacking, including poor initial assessments, lack of personalization, and a one-size-fits-all unimodal approach. Perhaps the greatest deficiency is that our current methods of teaching are “open loop”: they have a long cycle between the initial intervention and the updated intervention since exams that students take do not quickly translate into updated methods for improving student understanding.

Gazzaley sees technology as both a challenge to cognition, as it distracts and taxes our attention, and a potentially transformative intervention. He advocates creating high-tech, closed-loop intervention systems that assess students’ cognitive abilities and target their specific needs in a personalized way. Teachers not only intervene in a specific way, they then record the impact of that intervention and use that data to refine the intervention.

You can read more here and view his presentation on below.