Evolving project e-scape for national assessment

Abstract

In the opening paper in this Special Edition I outlined the major issues that led to the establishment of project e-scape. The project was intended to develop systems and approaches that enabled learners to build real-time web-based portfolios of their performance (initially) in design & technology and additionally to build systems and approaches to facilitate the web-based assessment of those portfolios. The project was commissioned by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) with additional ‘buy-in’ from Awarding Bodies—who were seen by QCA as the leading beneficiaries of a successful project. The project was designed in three phases. I have outlined—in the Introduction to this Special Edition—the early exploratory work that we undertook within phase 1, the aim of which was to prove the viability of the concept. This was achieved, and QCA then commissioned phase 2 with a brief to build a working prototype system and run it through a national pilot-testing programme in 2006. Age 15 was the target age-group, aligning as closely as we could with the Awarding Body requirements for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) that runs with age 16 learners. The successes of the phase 2 prototype—both as classroom activity and as reliable assessment—led QCA and Becta (the body responsible for funding ICT developments in schools) to commission phase 3 in which we explored the potential of the e-scape system for wider application. Specifically, we were required to demonstrate the transferability of the system to other curriculum areas beyond design & technology, and the scalability of the system if it were to be used for national assessment purposes, with hundreds of thousands of candidates. In this paper, I outline the approach that we adopted through the e-scape research; describe the major elements of the work both in terms of classroom/curriculum practice and in terms of new approaches to assessment; and analyse some of the key issues that arise from it.