Emerging technologies in higher education assessment and feedback practices: A systematic literature review

The use of Emerging Technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Learning Analytics (LA) and Extended Reality (XR) applications, in higher education has proliferated in recent times, as these technologies are considered to have a significant impact on the future of postsecondary teaching and learning. We wanted to find out the emerging technologies used in computing education, its evaluation and effectiveness, and limitations and gaps for future research. We carried out a Systematic Literature Review study on the use of Emerging Technologies in higher education computing education to identify the state of the art in the use of these three groups of technologies for assessment and feedback practices. After systematic search and filtering from a search pool of 3038 studies published between 2016 and 2021, we selected 38 articles for detailed meta-analysis. Our findings reveal that 71% of the reviewed studies are journal articles, 50% studies focus on learning analytics, and the majority of the studies employ quantitative approaches. The results from this systematic review suggest that XR technologies have received least attention to date in computing education (amongst the emerging technologies considered for the review) and there is a lack of frameworks for design, evaluation and use of emerging technologies in higher education. The findings of this review will be beneficial for researchers and educators to obtain an in-depth understanding of the main areas of application of emerging technologies in higher education computing education, an inventory of emerging technology tools used for assessment and feedback, effectiveness indicators, and evaluation approaches that have been used. For evidence-based guidance on future assessment and feedback practices using emerging technologies, we also present a brief research agenda, drawing attention to the need to trial more XR, focus on formative assessment and feedback practices, better understand impact of human-centric issues and take more thoughtful consideration of ethics in the use of emerging technologies in computing education.