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Research

The role of technology in the assessment of RE

Sam McKavanagh & Dr James Robson

Research Summary

Marking and feedback are essential parts of the teaching process, which allow teachers to know whether what they have taught has been learnt and therefore allow teachers to address the needs of pupils. They are also requirements for all teachers. However, they are time consuming and burdensome upon teachers. Technology has the potential to transform education, for teachers and for pupils. This study aims to investigate the role that technology has in the assessment of RE with the expectation that any benefits would also be felt in other curriculum subjects.

Researchers

Sam McKavanagh & Dr James Robson

Research Institution

University of Oxford

What is this about?

The planning was guided by these questions.

  • In assessment, what can technology do that traditional methods cannot?
  • How can the use of technology for assessment be beneficial to pupils?
  • How can the use of technology for assessment be beneficial to teachers?
  • How can technology allow us to meet the assessment objectives of RE?

What was done?

The three action cycles used different tools to assess pupils; multiple choice questions were used for each assessment.

  • Cycle One (Traditional): pupils completed assessments using pen and paper.
  • Cycle Two (Plickers): pupils held up unique pieces of card in different orientations to indicate their answer. The teacher’s smartphone could read and record the pupils’ response.
  • Cycle Three (EDpuzzle) – through this website pupils watched videos that the teacher had embedded with questions. Scores were recorded so the teacher could track progress over time.

At the end of each cycle the following were conducted:

  • whole-cohort questionnaires;
  • small-group interviews; and
  • teacher interviews.

Main findings and outputs

The findings show that technology:

  • saved time;
  • helped give quick and useful feedback;
  • collated results;
  • improved record keeping;
  • reduced teacher workload; and
  • increased pupil engagement.

In contrast, traditional methods of assessment failed to offer these benefits. Marking and feedback remained burdensome tasks for teachers and pupils did not respond favourably to them.

Technology has an important role in the assessment of RE. Pupils assessed using traditional methods and those assessed with technology showed no discernable differences in their results. The benefits to the teacher were clear: they saw a reduction in workload and were able to give immediate feedback and discuss issues with pupils which would not have had been possible with traditional methods. As Plickers and EDpuzzle can collate pupils’ results teachers can easily keep track of pupils’ performance across time, with minimal effort on their part. It is expected that these advantages would not only apply to RE and that teachers of other subjects, and in other school settings, would also benefit.

Relevance to RE

This was a piece of practitioner research and other teachers were involved in the collection of data. Therefore it will have real applicability to other teachers of RE.

The technology used is free to obtain and use and does not require pupil ownership of devices – this increases the accessibility to the technology.

One of the key findings was the savings in time for teachers whilst assessing and the production of useful real-time data, which they could use immediately to provide effective feedback to pupils.

Generalisability and potential limitations

Given the method of answer collection which the technology used, the research focussed on AT1/A01 (‘factual’ knowledge) the research did not attempt to assess AT2/A02 (‘learning from religion’) – whilst this should be possible, it was deemed that it would be stretching the research too thinly and that less clear results would be drawn. It would therefore be beneficial to retrial these technologies to attempt to assess AT2/A02 as well.

Given the length of the research project it was not possible to tell if pupils would become ‘bored’ or less enthused with the technologies the more normalised they became. A longer research process would uncover whether this is the case.

Find out more

McKavanagh, S. (2017). The role of technology in the assessment of RE (Master’s thesis). University of Oxford.

https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:27d8b9ef-0cab-4116-827a-d9b615627860

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