Assessment Methods and Generative Artificial Intelligence: How to Educate Prospective Teachers

Dear Colleagues,

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) is reshaping the assessment methods and practices at all educational levels, from primary to higher education contexts. From real-time feedback to data-driven learning analytics, GAI is offering new opportunities to design strategies for innovating both summative and formative assessments. 

Using GAI tools, teachers can quickly focus on the positive and negative aspects of a task completed by the students (summative assessment) and monitor student progress, personalizing instructions and fostering self-regulated learning (formative assessment). 

Artificial Intelligence represents an educational opportunity, but there is a risk that teachers will delegate GAI to carry out summative assessment or appoint GAI to suggest to students how to improve their own learning strategies.

Teacher education programs should consider this challenge and organize activities to support prospective teachers in designing meaningful assessment methods that use Generative Artificial Intelligence.

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue, ‘Assessment Methods and Generative Artificial Intelligence: How to Educate Prospective Teachers’, which aims to explore how GAI can be integrated into the teacher education programs (involving both pre- and in-service teachers) to enhance summative and formative assessment methods across multiple educational contexts and disciplines.

This Special Issue has the following aims:

• Investigate how GAI can be integrated within teacher education programs for pre-service teachers;
• Investigate how GAI can support the continuous professional development of in-service teachers;
• Explore the role of GAI in shaping summative and formative assessment strategies;
• Highlight empirical studies and design-based research on the implementation and impact of GAI on assessment tools;
• Address ethical and pedagogical considerations of assessment designs that use GAI.

Research areas may include, but not limited to, the following:

• Use of GAI for formative and summative assessments;
• Potential benefits and limitations of the use of GAI in formative and summative assessments;
• How to train pre-service and in-service teachers on the conscious use of GAI in assessments;
• How the use of GAI tools can promote the assessment literacy of students;
• Teachers’ and students’ perspectives on GAI-provided formative feedback;
• Educating teachers on the use of algorithms for monitoring learning;
• Transparency, accountability, and privacy issues related to the use of GAI in assessment practices;
• Ethical and critical aspects of using GAI in assessment practices;
• Equity and inclusion concerns related to the use of GAI tools in assessments;
• Conceptual frameworks supporting GAI-enhanced assessment strategies in teacher education programs.

Dr. Davide Parmigiani
Guest Editor

Elisabetta Nicchia
Myrna Pario
Guest Editor Assistants

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• AI-driven assessment
• GAI tools in assessment
• formative assessment
• summative assessment
• teacher education programs
• pre-service teachers
• in-service teachers