Are we any good? > Key Skills Resource Centre
Online Assessment Tool
"The Key Skills Resource Centre Project have been particularly impressed by Aurion's ability to make a reality out of our initial ideas and their capacity to respond, develop and implement change as our Project has taken shape. Their professionalism, expertise and advice have proved invaluable."
Tom Moore, Key Skills Resource Centre Project Manager
Summary of key achievements:
- Reduction of the person-hours for administration and management of Key Skills Assessments.
- Creation of an online solution with 3 key views:
- KSRC view
- Tutor view
- Learner view
- Creation of a unique adaptive intelligent question presentation algorithm.
The Challenge
The Key Skills Resource Centre is responsible for administering and managing initial Key Skills assessments for young people aged 16+ throughout Northern Ireland. KSRC work closely with local Training Organisations and Colleges, whose tutors are responsible for running the assessments.
This management is an annual task, resulting in many hours of devising assessment criteria, questions and answers, as well as the core administrative task of working with with local College and Training Organisation tutors to collate results.
Before working with Aurion, the setting of assessment questions and administration & management of assessment scoring were carried out manually using a laborious paper-based process.
The core task of collating results and formulating representative statistics for reporting purposes to the Department of Education was identified as a key area where person hours could easily be saved by using an automatic reporting tool.
KSRC sought Aurion's advice on developing a web-based solution that would reduce the effort in setting up and running the assessments annually, and would also provide an automatic reporting tool to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their statutory Department of Education reporting requirements.
The Aurion solution
Aurion created a unique online assessment tool called the Skills Tracking Assessment & Reporting Tool. This START tool provided three different views for KSRC, Tutors and Learners as follows:
- KSRC view - Content Management System to input 4 different question types with multiple graphic layouts.
- Tutor view - Assessment management area to allow tutors to schedule online tests for their classes and see reports of learner achievements.
- Learner view - Tool to allow learners to take a key skill assessment set-up by their tutor.
In the KSRC view, the KSRC staff input more than 200 questions for each Key Skill area. During a test, for each learner, the following happens:
- Random questions from the bank of 200 are presented to reduce the chance of copying answers and therefore increasing the integrity of the test.
- The skipped and incorrect answers are recorded, so that after the test, the tutor can see the types of difficulties each learner is having.
- The question algorithm adapts to how the learner answers the questions by presenting either a less difficult question or more difficult question, depending on whether he/she skips/gets a question wrong, or gets a question right.