Assessment design in higher education hasn’t kept up with the digital world. That’s not a controversial statement. Most educators know it and most institutions do as well. And yet the dominant response to digital technologies has been to use them as delivery mechanisms for the same kinds of tasks we’ve always used.
Upload the essay to the LMS, run it through a plagiarism checker, and record grades in a spreadsheet. Bearman, Nieminen, and Ajjawi (2023) make the case that this instrumental approach to technology in assessment is missing a much bigger picture, and they offer an organising framework that tries to correct it.
The paper, published in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, pulls together literature from educational technologies, assessment pedagogies, and digital literacies to propose three purposes for designing the digital into assessment. It’s a conceptual piece, not an empirical one, but the argument is well-structured and the framework fills a gap that’s been wide open for years.
Digital Assessment Design
Assessment frameworks don’t tend to account for technology. Educational technology frameworks don’t tend to account for assessment. Bearman et al. are trying to bridge those two worlds, and I think the attempt is largely successful.
The first purpose is the most familiar: using digital tools to make assessment better. Bearman et al. break this down into three considerations. The first is assessment rationale. They follow Boud and Soler (2016) in describing three reasons you might assess a student: to credential them (assessment of learning), to promote development through the task itself (assessment for learning), and to build capacities that extend beyond the course (sustainable assessment).
That third rationale connects to evaluative judgement, the idea from Tai et al. (2018, cited in Bearman et al., 2023) that students need to learn to judge quality for themselves. This is the rationale most likely to benefit from thoughtful digital integration, and also the one most often ignored when educators default to quizzes and plagiarism scanners.
The second consideration under this first purpose is the SAMR model: substitution, augmentation, modification, redefinition. Bearman et al. use it to help educators think about how deeply technology is integrated into their assessment design. A multiple-choice exam on a tablet is substitution. The same exam with adaptive questioning and automated feedback starts moving toward modification. And a fully digital simulation where students collaborate in real time across roles? That’s redefinition.
The model is useful, and Bearman et al. acknowledge it, but they also flag something that I think is worth paying attention to: SAMR has no category for when technology makes things worse. It assumes a direction of improvement. That’s a problem, because technology absolutely can degrade the student experience, and the framework doesn’t give you language for that.
Which brings us to the third consideration: potential harms. Bearman et al. are clear about this. Online proctoring might improve security but can raise anxiety. Inaccessible digital designs can exclude students with disabilities. Technologies can steer students toward instrumental behaviours that have nothing to do with learning. And because assessment designs tend to be iterative, Bearman et al. argue that evaluating for unintended negative impacts should be standard practice. I agree, and I’d add that this is one of those areas where a lot of institutions are still pretending the harms are hypothetical. They’re not. Students have been reporting them for years.
The second purpose is where the framework gets more interesting. Bearman et al. argue that assessment should develop and credential digital literacies, not just use digital tools. They draw on Pangrazio and Sefton-Green (2021, cited in Bearman et al., 2023) to distinguish two modes: mastery and proficiency on one side, and evaluation and critique on the other.
Mastery is about learning to use the tools. Critique is about understanding what those tools do to us, to our data, to our social structures. Both belong in assessment design, but Bearman et al. point out that the critique dimension is almost entirely absent from the assessment literature. The data literacies field has engaged with it, prompted by concerns about datafication and surveillance, but assessment design largely hasn’t.
There’s a related point that I think is one of the paper’s sharpest observations. Bearman et al. challenge the assumption that students will osmotically pick up digital skills just by completing a digitally-mediated task. A student who submits a video as part of an assessment doesn’t automatically develop digital literacies.
“If digital literacies are an outcome that is developed and judged through assessment, then the program must support the development of these capabilities” (p. 297). That’s a direct challenge to the way many courses operate. They expect digital competence as an input without teaching it, which creates equity barriers for students who don’t arrive with those skills already in place. I’ve covered similar arguments about AI literacy competency frameworks and who gets left behind when institutions assume prior knowledge that not everyone has.
The third purpose is the most conceptually ambitious: assessment should develop and credential uniquely human capabilities for a digital world. Bearman et al. are careful to distinguish this from the generic “21st century skills” language that’s been circulating since the 1990s. Creativity, collaboration, critical thinking: those are valuable, but they’re not new. What’s new is the specific set of capabilities that emerge from living in a digitally-mediated society. The task of synthesising information from an overwhelming flood of digital sources, for instance, requires something different from traditional critical thinking. It requires understanding how algorithms shape what you see and what you don’t.
I think the framework is strong, and it fills a genuine need. My concern is about uptake. Educators who are already stretched thin are more likely to reach for SAMR or a generic rubric than to work through three purposes with multiple considerations under each. The framework needs practical tools, workshops, templates, something that translates the conceptual clarity into design action. The paper acknowledges that the third purpose has “almost no examples of actual task designs,” and that gap matters. If we’re asking educators to design for uniquely human capabilities in a digital world, we need to show them what that looks like across disciplines, at scale.
That said, the paper’s real contribution is shifting the question. It’s not “how do we use technology in assessment?” It’s “what does assessment need to become in a digital world?” And those are very different questions with very different answers. Bearman, Nieminen, and Ajjawi have given us a framework that takes the second question seriously, and the field needs that.
References
- Bearman, M., Nieminen, J. H., & Ajjawi, R. (2023). Designing assessment in a digital world: An organising framework. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 48(3), 291-304. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2022.2069674
- Boud, D., & Soler, R. (2016). Sustainable assessment revisited. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 41(3), 400–413. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2015.1018133
- Pangrazio, L., & Sefton-Green, J. (2021). Digital rights, digital citizenship and digital literacy: What’s the difference? Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 10(1), 15–27. https://doi.org/10.7821/naer.2021.1.616
- Tai, J., Ajjawi, R., Boud, D., Dawson, P., & Panadero, E. (2018). Developing evaluative judgement: Enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work. Higher Education, 76(3), 467–481. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0220-3