Formative assessment helps guide students toward a shared understanding or performance goal and provides focus as students complete major milestones in their coursework. Summative assessment ensures that students have met the final goals of their projects and achieved a desired level of understanding or performance.

Learning management systems and other digital communication tools have changed how coursework is distributed and submitted, and now we have powerful new tools for reviewing and grading digital coursework. Digital assessment is particularly appropriate for grading collections of projects or eportfolios, semester- or year-long projects, and projects that contain several different file types. When you use innovative digital assessment strategies, you also give your students an opportunity to become familiar with and practice the digital communication skills that will prepare them for the 21st century workforce.

As you design and prepare coursework and subsequent assessment, consider the advantages to using Adobe® Acrobat® 9 Pro for digital assessment of student work:
• Digital methods help emphasize assessment as an iterative process that creates a feedback loop between teachers and students.
• The assessment workflow is streamlined and efficient because all materials are in one digital document.
• Audio and video commenting tools help you provide feedback on difficult concepts.
• Time-stamping comments and reviews preserve past versions so viewing the progression of work over time is easy. In addition, this feature can facilitate coursework that includes student reflection exercises.
• Digital documents are easy to distribute among several reviewers, allowing for simultaneous reviews that you can merge into one version.

When using Acrobat as your digital assessment tool, you must have your students submit their work in PDF format. You can then use Acrobat to comment and mark up the PDF document. This section of the Acrobat curriculum assumes a basic knowledge of the Acrobat interface and workflow for creating PDF documents.

If you are new to Acrobat, consult the “Creating electronic portfolios with Adobe Acrobat” guide, which includes an overview of Acrobat and instructions for converting files to PDF format.

Download the PDF to learn:
• How to use the commenting and markup tools
• How to view and hide comments and use the Comments List
• How to use the audio commenting feature
• How to review and comment on video assets contained in a PDF
• How to insert additional pages in a PDF
• How to create summary comment documents
• How to collect comments from multiple reviewers
• Best practices for digital assessment

Published with permission from Adobe.