What are Technology-Enhanced Items?

Today’s learning environments have seen a notable influx of digital technology products.

Various forms of educational technology are being used to increase learner engagement, provide better learning experiences, and assess knowledge of content with much more accuracy than before. Technology-Enhanced Items (or TEIs) play a large part in providing educators with ways to enhance the learning experiences of their students.

So what exactly are Technology-Enhanced Items?

According to the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a Technology-Enhanced Item is a computer-delivered item that includes specialized interactions for collecting response data. These include interactions and responses beyond traditional selected-response or constructed-response.

TEIs have been specifically designed to encourage students to construct an answer as opposed to merely selecting a response. They require students to think critically, and thus, they gain a better understanding of a student’s depth of understanding and knowledge of a particular topic.

Today, learners are extremely familiar with and have an easy time with technology. The intuitive nature of online technology products combined with interactive question types naturally makes the learning experience more authentic and engaging for learners.

The auto-scoring capabilities of Technology-Enhanced Items mean that assessment analytics and reporting is made easy. Feedback is a critical component of successful online learning strategies and should be corrective and targeted. Fortunately, the use of TEIs in assessment gives the ability to provide instantaneous learner and educator feedback.

Advantages of Technology-Enhanced Items

• TEIs can be used to assess learners’ high-level thinking skills and problem-solving abilities
• Including TEIs in assessments can resemble real-world scenarios in which learners might interact with content and information using technology
• Technology-Enhanced Items provide a more authentic and engaging experience for learners
• Educators are more informed about the thinking process and how the student has formulated their response
• Technology-Enhanced Items are computer-scorable, meaning data is gathered in the simplest way

Technology-Enhanced Items by Learnosity

Learnosity has one of the largest offerings of Technology-Enhanced Items. Creating engaging, interactive learning products is easily accomplished with its collection of over 65 TEIs. As expected, the Learnosity offering includes the humble Multiple-Choice Question (MCQ), in its most basic format as well as in several layouts and alternate response versions. Beyond MCQ, Learnosity opens up a world of learning opportunities, with question types that can be used to deliver learning content in the most powerful way. 

Building with Learnosity’s assessment platform gives your access to an impressive collection of Technology-Enhanced Item types including:

• Complex math & chemistry formula
• Visual questions (Including hotspot, shading, fill, file upload)
• Audio & voice (Spoken response)
• Graphing (Including Cartesian graphing)
• Drap & Drop (Text, image, classification)
• Fill in the blanks (Text, dropdown, image)
• Charts (Bar chart, line chart, histogram, dot plot, line plot)
• Match & order (Match, sort, order buttons/paragraphs/words & sentences)
• And much more!