My Little 2.0 Project

I do believe I am becoming somewhat obsessed with research projects!

From the middle of January 2024 until well into mid March, I found myself working for six days a week. Why you may ask? Well we were invited to take part in a very exciting trial, involving the introduction of online exams.

2022/23, I was approached to see if any of my groups would be interested in taking part in Phase 1. Phase 1 involved students playing around with state of the art exam software, to see what they could access. More importantly, they feedback their experiences to the lovely Pearson team.

For one week, as part of their revision, the students played around with the sample questions and the software. Everyone engaged especially well with the task. They liked the sticky notes features, being able to highlight, copy and paste but more importantly, students who had struggled in the past to get answers on paper, were completing answers in full. The potential for this style of exam is exponential!

I was then asked if a group would like to take part in the next phase of the trial. This phase involves students sitting one paper online and one paper on paper (the normal way.) The results of the whole group will be compared and these findings will contribute to how online exams are introduced over the next few years.

I had a group lined up, all was set to go, but then I had to go and get married, delaying the start. However, this delay brought forth more opportunity for the trial to expand. It went from one group to all my groups. Hearing what I was doing for my mock exams, made a few of my colleagues extremely curious. I was asked by the Pearson about the possibility of an expansion of the trial. We considered one whole college site taking part. But we were asked could we make it bigger still: could all students take part? The answer was a big resounding YES!

So, after many weeks organising groups, ensuring there was a balance of students of all abilities, we were ready!

I have been lead to believe, that before I came along, the college had never been involved in anything of this scale. Over 900 students, across 6 sites took part in the trial. So not only are our students trailling the 2.0 Lift qualification, they are also contributing important data, which will be used for the future development of exams.

So how did it go? Well I had organised training for staff, and Pearson had produced extensive instructions. There was an initial issue with the wrong link being used for some teachers, but with the help advice from the amazing Alexa at Pearson, we were swiftly sorted. A handful sat the wrong paper, (paper copies instead of online,) but that was our back up plan for where we had areas of no WiFi.

What was so wonderful about the mocks trial was that the papers were marked and returned by the mocks team. We were able to access results and all papers, so students could use these as part of their revision. The trail was very successful from our end and reports from Pearson have been that we provided them with some very useful feedback. (Students all completed a feedback form.) I think if we were approached to do something similar again, we are certainly set up to be able to do so without any major issues.

I have to say, if you are privileged enough to take part in the trial, I would highly recommend it! There were hiccups, but nothing too serious. All students had equal opportunity and the vast majority were extremely positive! The biggest winning factor was not having to write on a completely different document! Ideas were not lost from paper to screen. In fact, several of my students and my own daughter, were disappointed that it would not be available for Summer 24.

Here’s to more research projects moving forward! 🙂