A NEW AGE OF ORACY?
In a series of online essays, Jonathan Wheeldon has been exploring the wider implications of AI for all our futures. Here he looks at the future of educational assessment.
AI – the opportunities and the risks
Like so many others, I have recently been exercised by the effect of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on our humanity. Or more specifically (in relation to my most recent experience) on the future of education and how our assessment systems must evolve.
The astonishing acceleration in the usage of large language models (LLMs) through applications such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and DeepSeek has produced seemingly miraculous opportunities for productivity and for learning. It has also triggered unforeseen risks for humanity. This makes the need to rethink educational assessment methods really quite urgent. Governments have been tinkering around the edges of this challenge for many years, but without the political appetite or the confidence to get to the heart of the matter.
Leading with assessment
Meaningful improvements in education will (in my view) only occur when we draw upon the merits of formative and summative assessment in flexible ways to capture the breadth of human potential more holistically. The EPQ is just one example of how this has been happening. We now need to take advantage of the impressive ways that AI can support adaptive learning and assessment.
This can in turn develop the essential lifelong skills of self-directed and self-regulated learning, making human interactions with learners more rich and targeted experiences.
The approach simultaneously embraces the future whilst respecting the Socratic traditions of the past.