Digital badges are web-enabled tokens of learning and accomplishment. Unlike traditional grades, certificates, and transcripts, badges can include specific claims and detailed evidence in support of those claims. The Design Principles Documentation project is systematically following the introduction of digital badges in thirty diverse educational projects. This has revealed that the introduction of digital badges prompted useful deliberations about (a) the learning to be recognized, (b) the claims to be made about that learning, and (c) the assessments needed to support those claims. These deliberations should enhance the evidential, consequential, and ecological validity of these claims. Therefore, the evidence contained in badges offers unprecedented opportunity for analyzing learning and activity in educational contexts. This presentation will review how a wide range of current educational projects are using the evidence contained in digital badges. These include some of the thirty projects funded in the MacArthur Foundation’s Badges for Lifelong Learning initiative in 2012-2013, programs from YouMedia in the 2013 Chicago Summer of Learning, and from an open online course on educational assessment offered at Indiana University in Fall 2013.

Daniel Hickey is an Associate Professor and Program Coordinator with the Learning Sciences program at Indiana University.  He completed his Ph.D. in Psychology at Vanderbilt University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Performance Assessment at Educational Testing Service.  He studies assessment, motivation, and accountability in technology-based learning environments.  He is currently leading the Design Principles Documentation project with the support of the MacArthur Foundation, and the Big Open Online Course project with the support of Google. (See this recent interview about Dan Hickey's work.)