What changes in education assessment have been triggered by big data

Are two test takers who also scored 90 points on an exam exactly the same?

In the classroom, the teacher tells the students, "Complete questions one through ten." But is it really necessary for all students to complete the 10 questions?

In the process of teaching, how to better inspire students, how to better classroom interaction, the length of a lesson is 40 minutes appropriate, or 45 minutes appropriate. These questions, the teachers are "experience", or rely on scientific analysis?

If you've thought about these questions, you'll be open to the idea of big data changing the shape of education.

The era of big data has quietly arrived, and data that could not be collected and analyzed in the past have been given possibilities by new technological means. Whoever can dig deeper into big data will have a head start in the development of the industry, and the same is true for the education sector.

Just a few days ago, Wisers Education announced the launch of "Find a seat", a vertical recruitment platform on top of the original online education platform. From the analysis of learners' career aptitude, to the recommendation of suitable positions, to the personalized design of the course, after the assessment, certification, and ultimately pushed to the matching recruitment positions, completing a complete set of learners from learning to job hunting path. This is a very different education model from the previous school education, which has triggered heated discussions in the industry, and it is based on the personalized data analysis of the learners to complete.

Are the two candidates who scored the same 90 points at the same level of competence?

Big Data Makes Education Truly About Each Individual

"One has to admit that we know too little about students." It's a classic mantra from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Education, and it's also the topic that gets the most attention at the Big Ten's annual conference on education. Similar thinking exists in our nation's education field as well.

"Do we really know our children?" "Every child is unique and different, but can we truly individualize and differentiate instruction for them?"

To take a simple example, are two test takers who also scored 90 on a math test exactly the same? According to the traditional teaching model, we would assume that students with the same score have roughly similar abilities. However, if we borrow the analyzing tools of big data, the differences of students will be clearly shown. According to the analysis of the same two 90-point candidates, we found that the first student relied more on excellent logical thinking, while the other student's logical reasoning ability is relatively weak, and is relying on excellent memory to obtain better results.

Big data can therefore enable us to take a more holistic view of student development, and to identify deeper issues that are not reflected in previous test scores. Of course, if teachers can keep abreast of this situation, they can develop different teaching styles and directions for the two students.

For example, usually the way a teacher assigns homework is, "Please complete questions one through ten." "Please read these 10 books over the vacation." Assigning the same books and the same topics to different students is not wrong in the traditional education model, but if new technologies have helped us to have a full understanding of each student's personality and characteristics, we will assign homework in a targeted way, and thus realize that dream that stretches over 2,000 years - teaching according to the talent.

If student A gets the second question right, the system can immediately tell him that he can skip the fourth and eighth questions, this is because the second, fourth and eighth questions are examining the same knowledge points, and if they are all done then it is a simple repetition. If student B makes a mistake in the third question, then the system will prompt him to intensively practice the sixth and ninth questions, this is because, based on the analysis of big data, students who make mistakes in the third question are likely to make mistakes in the sixth and ninth questions as well. And targeted repeated training is very necessary.

Such a pattern is not new to us, some websites will be based on your purchasing habits, targeted push some products, as well as microblogging operators based on what you have been following to determine who is likely to be interested in what, are based on this principle, that is, the analysis of big data.

If commercial websites are already getting to know their students better, why can't our teachers get to know their students better?

Can big data tools and new technologies replace teachers?

Optimizing the traditional teaching model, so that the classroom to reduce indoctrination, increase interaction

In recent times, the "curtain class" is a deserved "hot word" in the field of education, following the Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and other universities have joined the foreign universities led by the formation of the "hot word". After Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University have joined the foreign universities led by the formation of the curtain class alliance, a few days ago, Shenzhen University, the United Nations within the 40 universities to form a "national university UOOC alliance", aiming to create their own curtain class belonging to the Chinese university alliance.

This news has once again made the "massive online open course" based on new technological means a hot topic in the social and educational fields. While discussing the impact of new technologies on the traditional teaching model, people naturally issued this thought: big data tools and the curtain course will replace the traditional teaching model, and ultimately make teachers lose their jobs?

The answer should be negative.

"The new technology does not replace teachers, but redefines education." Wei Zhong, an associate professor at the School of Economics and Management at Shanghai Maritime University, believes, "Can you not have teachers in the flipped classroom and education under information technology? Quite the contrary, you see the video of online courses, more and more standardized. But students are individualized, which requires us teachers to learn to efficiently use high technology, use of educational information resources, targeted, more personalized guidance for students to grow and progress."

Why?

Bill Gates once predicted that "five years from now, you'll be able to get the world's best courses online for free, and they'll be better than anything offered by any individual university." Yes, in the future, students will be able to access courses from any university, from any teacher, across countries and ethnicities, without barriers or walls. This will bring a possibility that online learning is increasingly becoming the main way to learn knowledge, and the data of students' learning behaviors will be automatically retained, making it easier to evaluate and assess learning behaviors at a later stage. Teachers will no longer analyze students' ****similarities, preferences in learning, and difficulties encountered based on their own teaching experience, but can easily get the learning process by analyzing and integrating the behavioral records of learning The rules in the learning process can be easily obtained by analyzing and integrating the records of learning behaviors.

What about offline? The traditional classroom will be functionally transformed into a place for exchanging learning results and solving problems, and become a necessary complement to online learning.

Fang Yechang, founder of Wisers Education Group, gave a supportive view of this, "After quite a long time of exploring online education, we have found that online education can't completely replace offline education, and perhaps in the future, for a single course, students across the country, or even around the world, will listen to a single teacher through the Internet, but students will still need to learn from a large number of teachers who have taught the course in the same way. However, students still need a large number of teachers who also teach this course to take up the offline functions of supplemental learning, guidance, Q&A, interaction, evaluation and so on. The new technology will liberate some teachers, some of them from the traditional teaching post to the auxiliary learning post, while others from the traditional teaching post to devote to the innovation of new teaching content and methods. These are indispensable in ways that online education cannot accomplish."

In this regard, Wei Zhong believes, "Information technology has liberated some innovative teachers to abandon a lot of repetitive labor and focus on the core functions of teachers, which is the liberating power of technology."

When all is said and done, we will find that big data is actually not mysterious, and the change of big data for education will be complementary rather than subversive. As Susanna Zhang, founder of Shanghai Silai's Information Consulting Co., Ltd, said, "The arrival of the big data era has allowed the development and research in the field of social sciences to gradually move from macro-groups to micro-individuals, making it possible to track the data of each individual, and thus making it possible to study each individual. For educational researchers, we will be closer than ever to discovering the real student." And that, in a nutshell, is the progress of education.