Covid 19, school closures and the uptake of a digital assessment for learning pilot project during Ireland’s national lockdown

Abstract

DALDIS is a three-year EU-funded Erasmus+ Project on Digital Assessment for Learning (2019–2022) involving five European countries. DALDIS is pilot testing a digital assessment for learning solution focused on Science and Modern Foreign Language Learning in years 5–9. Underpinned by the Study Quest technology, which is designed to drive students’ learning progression using well-designed question-sets and student feedback, DALDIS is built on the principle that formative assessment is one of the best methods to encourage student achievement. Although Assessment for Learning (AFL) using technology has great potential for learning, it is not widely used in Europe. As the project lead Ireland was responsible for the first adaptation of StudyQuest, known as JCQuest for its Junior Cycle science and French curriculum. Unexpectedly, the commencement of DALDIS coincided with school closures due to Covid-19 and this appears to have influenced the uptake in student usage of JCQuest to support online learning and exam preparation. This paper provides an insight into how students engaged with JCQuest, key usage patterns and types of devices used based on Google Analytics data during two crucial school closure periods during Ireland’s pandemic.

Keywords:

• assessment for learning
• computer-based assessment
• covid-19
• Erasmus+
• science and modern foreign language learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Erasmus+ [grant number 2019-1-IE01-KA201-051567].

Notes on contributors

Miriam Judge

Dr Miriam Judge is a lecturer in digital media in the School of Communications at Dublin City University, Ireland. Her main research interest is in the use of digital media and educational technology in schools. She has led and managed a number of high profile projects in the area of technology enabled learning both nationally and internationally including the Micool Project (2015–2017) on the deployment of Tablet technologies in European schools (www.micool.org) and the DALDIS project (2019–2022) on Digital Assessment for Learning (www.daldis.eu). She is treasurer and a member of the National Executive of the Computers in Education Society of Ireland (www.cesi.ie), an organisation which promotes and supports the use of digital technology in Education, a steering committee member of the National Digital Skills Coalition and a former Advisory Board member of TechWeek (www.techweek.ie), Ireland's nationwide festival of technology. In 2019 Dr Judge was made a fellow of the Irish Computer Society (www.ics.ie) in recognition of her work in promoting and supporting the educational technology agenda in Ireland.