Online Diagnostic Assessment in Support of Personalized Teaching and Learning: The eDia System

The aims of this paper are: to provide a comprehensive introduction to eDia, an online diagnostic assessment system; to show how the use of technology can contribute to solve certain crucial problems in education by supporting the personalization of learning; and to offer a general reference for further eDia-based studies. The primary function for which the system is designed is to provide regular diagnostic feedback in three main domains of education, reading, mathematics, and science, from the beginning of schooling to the end of the 6 years of primary education. The cognitive foundations of the system, the assessment frameworks, are based on a three-dimensional approach in each domain, distinguishing the psychological (reasoning), the application, and the disciplinary (curricular content) dimensions of learning. The frameworks have been carefully mapped into item banks containing over a 1,000 innovative (multimedia-supported) items in each dimension. The online assessments were piloted, and the system has been operating in experimental mode in over 1,000 schools for several years. This paper outlines the theoretical foundations of the eDia system and summarizes how results from research on the cognitive sciences, learning and instruction, and technology-based assessment have been integrated into a working system designed to assess a large population of students. The paper describes the main functions of eDia and discusses how it supports item writing, constructing tests, online test delivery, automated scoring, data processing, scaling and the provision of feedback both for students and teachers. It shows how diagnostic assessments can be implemented in school practice to facilitate differentiated instruction through regular measurements and to provide instruments for teachers to make formative assessments. Beyond its main function (supporting development toward personalizing education), the eDia platform has been used for assessments in a number of areas from pre-school to higher education both in Hungary and in a number of other countries as well. The paper also reviews results from eDia-based studies and highlights how technology-based assessment extends the possibilities of educational research by making more constructs measurable.