Assessment Design for Digital Education: An Analytics-based Authentic Assessment Approach

This study looks to identify an assessment design construct that overcomes known issues in authentic assessment design practices in digital education. These include lack of "freedom-of-choice", lack of focus on multimodal nature of the digital process, and shortage of effective feedbacks. This study proposes an authentic assessment, that combines gamification (G) with heutagogy (H) and multimodality (M) of assessments, building upon learning analytics (A), known as GHMA. Proposed assessment design is a skills-oriented game-based assessment approach. Learners can determine their own goals and create individualized multimodal artefacts; receive cognitive challenge through cognitively complex tasks structured in gamified non-linear learning paths; while reflecting on personal growth through personalized feedback derived from learning analytics. This pilot research looked to: (i) establish validity of all key elements within the assessment design through structural equation modelling, and (ii) identify if application of assessment design leads to improved learner satisfaction based on differences-in-differences estimation using hierarchical linear regression. Results validated all key elements of GHMA assessment model, as beneficial factors tied to positive learner satisfaction on assessment delivery. There existed statistically significant positive post- and pre-treatment differences between the experimental and control group satisfaction survey scores, which indicated positive receptivity of proposed assessment design.