Risk and reliability

Posted on November 29, 2011 by John Winkley

Over recent months, I’ve had the opportunity to visit a number of different countries to discuss e-assessment (on-screen testing) and related technologies such as on-screen marking, and I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve found – trying to make sense of what is a complex picture.  Without venturing too far into speculation, (but admitting my evidence base is a bit limited), here are some of the conclusions I’ve come to.

Overall, I think it’s a fairly widely held view that the uptake of e-assessment is not proceeding as quickly as many of us would like, perhaps particularly those who are more optimistic and go-ahead about the use of IT in education. Continue reading →

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Getting the right result

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Peter Burke

As a former Chief Executive of the Southern Examining Group for the GCSE I’ve retained my interest in the world of public examinations. Awarding Organisations (as they are now called though goodness knows how that distinguishes them from Awarding Bodies or Examination Boards as they used to be known) are having a rough time in the media at the moment because of the errors that have been found in some AS and GCSE question papers. It’s not that the AOs won’t take account of these errors in the marking and awarding process – they all have set procedures to deal with these problems. But this time the candidates are complaining that they have wasted time trying to answer questions that can’t be answered because of inaccurate or incomplete information and that’s more difficult for the AOs to judge. But I see that Ofqual is on the case so we’ll see what happens.

Reading all this set me thinking about how exam boards operated years ago. Continue reading →

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Communities of practice

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Anne Matthews

AlphaPlus as a consultancy specialising in assessment and evaluation tends to focus on the measurement of the outcomes of the education process, rather than on the educational process and the context itself.  However, we were fortunate recently to secure a project which has taken us to the heart of a current influential movement across a broad range of educational contexts, namely communities of practice.

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Wenger, June 2006 http://www.ewenger.com/theory/

The project became known as Open Source Schools (opensourceschools.org.uk). Continue reading →

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What are we looking for when we test ICT skills?

Posted on June 23, 2011 by Gavin Reynaud

At AlphaPlus we’ve a long history of producing ICT skills tests, covering Key skills, Skills for Life, functional skills and the TDA QTS tests.  We’ve also covered formative and summative testing, with tests ranging from screening tests, through full diagnostics to high stakes exams for awarding qualifications, with a particular interest in providing on-screen testing solutions.  As you’d expect we also keep an eye on what else is in the market, from the basic skills options like ECDL/ICDL through vendor qualifications like the Microsoft certificates, onto the sector qualifications like the eSkills ITQ. Against this backdrop I’ve also sat through an uncountable number of presentations telling me about how today’s young learners are digital natives, steeped in the world of IT, fluently operating devices that mystify the older teachers seeking to educate them!

It is in this context that I often sit back, and ponder the skills we are testing, question the assumptions we make about the digital natives and muse whether there are ‘better’ tests of skills we could be making.  Continue reading →

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