Challenges with Designing Online Assessment to Support Student Task Understanding

While online assessments can provide new opportunities to redesign traditional assessments, they also present challenges related to design and communication to support students. Open-ended online assessment may place more onus on students to make choices, interpret assessment requirements and self-regulate their learning. This chapter presents some challenges of re-imagined online assessment design for teachers and students in one case study example, drawn from a collective case study. The chapter outlines student, teacher and contextual challenges that affect how a task may be interpreted and reflects on practical implications for the design of online assessment for learning.