At Reperio, we believe that technology in education should be in the service of what students and teachers do.  It should make things easier and make it possible to do more.  It should amplify and make success easier and more scalable.

 

We all know that formative assessment is a valuable tool to shape future learning or teaching, rather than achieve a grade or certification. Naming the practice didn’t invent it.   Teachers have probably always done it.   You want to know what the student knows before you try to teach them new material.

 

Research supports what teachers know intuitively.   A lot of work has been done to develop and refine techniques that make formative assessment work.   Our mission is to put this work in the hands of teachers and make it easy for them to do the kinds of formative assessment that they find useful.

 

There are some basic requirements:

 

First, the formative assessment must be targeted.   When you’re teaching how to add fractions, you don’t need to look at everything.  You need to look at the material that’s relevant to fractions that impacts what you’re doing NOW.

 

Second, the assessment has to be simple to set up, distribute and do.   You don’t need another time consuming activity.  Time is your precious resource and you have to be able to get the value with a minimum of effort.   

 

If the technology can be targeted and easy, then teachers will should expect that it’s doing what they think of as formative assessment.  By observing and talking to lots of teachers, it became clear that interactivity is key.  Teachers do not do formative assessment by giving students problems, folding their hands and letting the students fail on their own.  They interact with them.  They support them.  There are reasons for this.   Students fail for all kinds of reasons and you don’t see the reason unless you work with them.

 

A student, for example, might get something wrong because they just don’t know the right concepts.  Or it might be that they know the concept but aren’t sure how to use it.  Or they might be too timid?  Or they might have momentarily forgotten.  These are all different and it really matters for teachers which case it is.

 

The Reperio tool implements this assistance in a way that directly emulates what teachers do.  Of course, we’re not saying that it’s as smart as a teacher.  It isn’t, but it does enough of the work so that the teacher gets meaningful results.  We know that your scarce resource is time and you can use a machine to take over some part of the task.  As long as it does its job.

 

In this time of COVID, we know that the demand for formative assessment is unprecedented. Teachers don’t have more time now and so technologists need to provide a tool that helps.  To do this correctly, though, means that the tool needs to be targeted, simple and what we call congruent.  “Congruent” is just our fancy word for indicating that it’s following the teacher model for the task.  For formative assessment, it means interactive.

 

We have spent a lot of time analyzing the research and testing out different implementations in live pilots.  We required grounding in research and practice.  Throughout, we’ve stayed committed to providing teachers with a timely effective tool that fits seamlessly into your educational mission.