A couple of days ago I was sitting in on the educational technology strand sessions of the 2013 NARST conference and getting frustrated!

A wonderful thing that is happening is that many researchers are developing interactive learning and serious gaming environments that are teaching kids to develop content knowledge and skills in science. And they are collecting oodles of log data from those environments. 

The other good thing is that they are aware that they need to be assessing the learning as the kids go through the experience, but most are not well informed about how to do so. I keep seeing people trying to find the patterns of learning in the data to determine where they should embed assessments and what those should be measuring. 

I wish that more of them would be thinking about assessment using the Evidence Centred Design (ECD) approach. If they thought about what they want kids to know and be able to do, then determine what evidence they would accept that students have those knowledge and skills, and then design tasks that will elicit that kind of evidence. Then they wouldn't need to be data mining to find out what to measure. They need educational measurement experts in their projects!