Keynotes Presentations

Bio

James W. Pellegrino is Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also serves as Co-director of UIC’s interdisciplinary Learning Sciences Research Institute. His research and development interests focus on children's and adult's thinking and learning and the implications of cognitive research and theory for assessment and instructional practice. Dr. Pellegrino has served as head of several U.S. National Academy of Sciences study committees, including co-chair of the Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice, and co-chair of the Committee on the Foundations of Assessment which issued the report Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment. Most recently he served as a member of the Committee on Science Learning: Games, Simulations and Education. He is a past member of the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council and a lifetime member of the National Academy of Education.

Abstract

For more than a decade, assessment has constituted one of the most controversial issues in education with respect to matters of theory, design, implementation, and educational policy (see e.g., Pellegrino, Chudowsky, & Glaser, 2001). Many of the arguments surround what we assess, how we assess and the ways in which information derived from assessments is used to shape educational practice. As argued in various sources (e.g., Quellmalz & Pellegrino, 2009), new technologies provide opportunities to shift our assessment systems from a primary focus on summative and accountability practices to one focused instead on formative uses in which assessment information becomes an integral part of the teaching and learning process. But it is not simply a matter of using technology to shift how we assess students, nor the uses to which we put the information. Most importantly, it is a matter of careful considerations of what can and should become the targets for assessment – the types of knowledge and skill that arise in a 21st century digital world and that are essential for academic and personal success. It is the confluence of method, use, and content that offers the greatest chance for a dramatic shift in the productive integration of assessment into the processes of teaching and learning. This presentation will explore these issues and consider the prospects for a fundamental shift from measuring what is convenient to measuring what matters.

Bio

Adjunct Professor at the Department of Applied Informatics, Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), Brazil, where he teaches courses in Information Systems, Databases, Web Science and Social & Semantic Web. He holds a M.Sc. (1999) and a Ph.D. (2005) in Computer Science, both from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. His research interests include knowledge representation and management; collaborative systems; social web; semantic web; ontologies; information integration; semantic models; user models; and learning & education. He has experience in the Computer Science area, with focus on Database and Technology Enhanced Learning. He has participated in some international research projects and has written more than 70 papers for conferences, journals, and books.

Abstract

There is a lot of discussion and proposals on how to develop content for learning. Usually they use the terminology of learning objects and consider the creation of the respective metadata. In addition, there is also some works and experiences on how to make use of content on teaching and learning activities. This talk is going to describe some research experiences on conceptualizing, structuring, representing, retrieving and using content on Education. This content-based approach also deals with content segmentation, sharing and composition issues. Some results of this approach are going to be summarized and some questions are going to be raised throughout the presentation on cognition and exploratory learning in digital age.

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