Digital classroom assessment and student online behaviour: Rethinking teacher responsibilities in preventing technology-facilitated gender-based violence

The rapid integration of digital technologies into teaching, learning, and assessment has created new avenues through which technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) may occur in school settings. Existing scholarship has examined TFGBV mainly through the lenses of cyberbullying, digital safety, and student well-being. At the same time, emerging work has also begun to conceptualise digital assessment systems as sites of structural and institutional gendered risk. Building on this systems-level perspective, this conceptual paper shifts attention to the pedagogical and interactional layer of digital assessment, examining how teachers' assessment design and oversight decisions may shape the conditions under which TFGBV becomes more or less likely. Developed through a critical interdisciplinary literature review, the paper draws on Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, digital citizenship frameworks, and classroom assessment scholarship to examine how learning management systems, peer assessment tools, collaborative online assignments, and social media-integrated assessment activities may create conditions conducive to gendered harassment, image-based abuse, and exclusionary behaviour among learners of all genders. The paper proposes the Assessment-Mediated Digital Ethics (AMDE) framework, a theoretically grounded but not yet empirically validated model integrating gender-responsive assessment design, embedded digital behavioural expectations, and structured teacher oversight. AMDE is presented as a complementary pedagogical extension of existing justice-oriented approaches to digital assessment and TFGBV, rather than as a claim of first conceptualisation. The framework provides a basis for future empirical research examining teacher-mediated assessment practices and their relationship to digital safety, ethical participation, and TFGBV risk across diverse educational contexts. Responsibility for TFGBV prevention is understood as shared among teachers, learners, schools, families, technology providers, and policymakers.