Conversation-Based Assessment
G. Tanner Jackson, Diego Zapata‐Rivera · 2016
Conversation-based assessments (CBAs) represents a new type of performance-based assessment where students engage in an adaptive dialogue exchange with a computer with one or more virtual agents. This assessment approach leverages the open response format of human-to-human conversations – similar to constructed response items – in order to allow students to express their thoughts and ideas using their own words. Additionally, CBAs are highly interactive – similar to simulations – and contain automatically adapted dialogue structures. Both of these features allow for the collection of new types of explanatory evidence that potentially afford greater insight into student cognition and metacognition. In this chapter we discuss CBAs in more detail, provide an augmented framework to contrast CBAs and other kinds of assessment tasks, and illustrate the power of CBAs through two sub-tasks from a recently developed assessment prototype.