d. Assessing Learning

As with any form of teaching, when the work is done it is essential that valid and accurate forms of assessment take place. When you are using ICT in teaching, several dangers arise that are not so obvious. These stem from the easy availability and the ease of manipulation of information and ideas, and it is best to be clear about them in the first case study.

1. You need to be confident that the information received and used by students has been arrived at "deliberately" - that is as a function of their acquisition of numeracy skills rather than by fortuitous approximation or guesswork.
2. You need to be confident that the answers and conclusions are the student's own, or that new ideas presented to them through technology have been assimilated in a way that is appropriate.
3. You need to be satisfied that both you and the students appreciate the differences between speed and content, and that you are not merely using technology to complete tasks quicker but at the same standard as before.
4. The key measure of success is of course the student's understanding of the numeracy elements in the key objectives of the case study. There is a danger that providing multiple sensory stimuli to get him or her to become familiar with the necessary skills to interpret the data, will act as a non-numeracy form of short-circuit to understanding. Here it is crucial to establish that numerical understanding has come through numerical means.
5. Individual and shared progress and achievement - often the technology will have been used by pairs and groups, as well as by individuals. Here you need to have a method of ensuring that credit goes to the right student of the pair/group for the work done or learning achieved.
6. ICT use and opportunities to assess learning. Throughout the time you are using ICT to develop student's learning it is crucial to keep an eye on the opportunities presented by ICT to allow you to intervene with an assessment, or whether the ICT has provided you with an assessment opportunity that you had not foreseen. The expert e-mail exchange is an obvious example of this, but so is observing the student make intelligent decisions about the worth of a database.

For discussion with your mentor:

• How many of the points made above have you seen in the course of your work developing the case study, and are there any others you expect to come across?

Part 3: Evaluating the Use of ICT in Teaching and Learning