Gilbert Valdez, Ph.D.

The value of technology is to add productivity to learning. If you think about what the tractor did for farming, this is what technology can do for learning and it's become a necessary productivity tool for the future. If you look at 21st century skills, they're going to be requiring the use of technology very effectively. And some of the things that we most should be testing are those abilities to find, evaluate, and package in a different way—more meaningful according to the audience—that knowledge, and not necessarily looking for what did somebody say before was the—because there may be no right answer. Or more often nobody has ever answered that particular question because the knowledge is new. So, I think what technology does is serve as a very powerful tool which means that in assessment, if you're going to assess for it, you better have that tool as a part of the assessment instrument, or assessment strategy. It's kind of ridiculous to think that we could assess very powerful uses of technology with paper-pencil or multiple-choice questions, when in fact, you really have to talk about: can the student do the task …that you're trying to document.