Despite what you might have suspected in high school, teachers can’t read minds. However, using an innovative style of teaching known as “stealth assessment,” it’s now easier for instructors to understand the processes and progression of how learners address challenges, solve problems and formulate answers to questions posed to them.
What's Stealth Assessment?
Based on performance tracking developed originally for video games, stealth assessment monitors a learner’s performance throughout their use of online or electronic instruction both in and out of the classroom. By implementing stealth assessment, trainers can gain insight to not just gaps in knowledge, but also a direct peek into the thoughts, insights and observations of learning as it is taking place.
Stealth assessment can also provide the instructor direct feedback on observable – but often intangible – elements of education such as time management, identity management, the ability of the learner to see from other perspectives, teamwork, systems thinking and creative problem solving.
Stealth Assessment Benefits
For the learner, there are several advantages. Ongoing feedback from the teaching program to the player/learner helps them learn by doing, which helps improve both the learning processes and their outcomes. The process also documents a learner’s attributes and distinctive styles of learning, which can be measured and verified as part of the assessment, eventually allowing the process to capitalize on a learner’s strengths and bolster their weaknesses.
Because of its basis in the world of gaming, stealth assessment is often most successful in a gamified learning environment, lending itself best to a fully wired classroom, posing many challenges to traditional primary and secondary schools.
However, one area where it’s easily applicable is in the corporate training environment, where many training and seminar rooms already feature the necessary tools in the form of audience response technology.
Where and how would you use Stealth Assessment? Do you have a different approach that works? Leave us a comment.
