Stealth Assessments’ Technical Architecture

Abstract

With advances in technology and the learning and assessment sciences, educators can develop learning environments that can accurately and engagingly assess and improve learners’ knowledge, skills, and other attributes via stealth assessment. Such learning environments use real-time estimates of learners’ competency levels to adapt activities to a learner’s ability level or provide personalized learning supports. To make stealth assessment possible, various technical components need to work together. The purpose of this chapter is to describe an example architecture that supports stealth assessment. Toward that end, the authors describe the requirements for both the game engine/server and the assessment engine/server, how these two systems should communicate with each other, and conclude with a discussion on the technical lessons learned from about a decade of work developing and testing a stealth-assessment game called Physics Playground.