Personalized assessment of higher-order thinking skills

As our society moves from an information-based to an innovation-based environment, it is not just important what you know, but how you can use your own knowledge in order to solve problems and create new knowledge. Hence, assessment systems need to evaluate not just the students'factual knowledge, but also their problem-solving and reasoning strategies. This leads to a demand for the assessment of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS). This paper analyzes HOTS and possibilities for their measurement. As a result, adaptive assessment systems (AASs) are in response to the emerging need of personalization while assessing HOTS. AASs take student's individual context, prior knowledge and preferences into account in order to personalize the assessment. This personalized support helps students develop HOTS. But, this paper also reveals several arising issues, which need to be addressed when measuring HOTS with AASs.