Authored by Simon Trevers
Whilst possibilities for adding interactive digital tools into on-screen assessments exist today, many exams still consist of simple multiple choice style questions which can both be relatively rapidly authored and marked.
The time and cost involved in creating innovative question types and content has, far too often, been prohibitive for those already stretched authors to be able to implement at scale.
With the ever increasing prevalence of AI in both education and the professional world, the need to assess beyond knowledge recall, and instead focus upon a candidate’s application of knowledge becomes increasingly important. Integration of true-to-life-tasks with which candidates are familiar, or will use in the real world, enables more immersive and realistic assessment of the knowledge and skills that test publishers are aiming to evaluate.
Inspera helps reduce barriers to entry, shortening the time required to create and implement effective technology enhanced-questions and interactions that reflect real-world scenarios. Inspera addresses this need through the use of a structured, AI-enhanced prototyping and development methodology process with human-in-the-lead review.
Our approach to production of new interactions and question types offers several key advantages:
from weeks or months to hours or days, enabling working prototypes to be shared with customers and Product teams.
ensuring consistency in accessibility, packaging, and testing, which results in question types of consistently high quality.
to imagine and deliver realistic assessment experiences in almost any subject matter or area of expertise, enabling test takers to truly demonstrate their skills in a valid, equitable manner.
Understanding PCI
A key enabler to innovation in question types and interactions is through the 1EdTech® standard for Portable Custom Interactions (PCI). Built as an enhancement to the QTI standard (Question & Test Interoperability), PCI has now been available for over a decade and enables the creation of interactive question types using a variety of innovative tools.
PCI offers a flexible approach allowing users to directly contribute to and design new question types and content, which can be far richer than simple multiple choice type questions.
How PCI interactions work
Inspera Assessment enables awarding bodies, certification providers and educational institutions to take advantage of PCI interactions in several ways:
Display a simulation, such as a molecular structure, that test takers can manipulate before answering questions.
Make a resource available throughout an entire test or test section, such as a scientific or graphical calculator.
Enable test takers to work directly within the interaction to answer the question, supporting manual or human marking as appropriate.
This flexibility enables assessment authors to create a wide range of assessment experiences, across all subjects, according to the needs of their qualification and blueprint.
AI-ENHANCED DEVELOPMENT
The flexibility offered by Inspera’s support for a wide range of custom interactions is enormous, and that presents the next challenge: Whilst SMEs creating exam questions understand what authentic tasks look like in their domain, the development loop for new interactions can be slow, expensive, and prone to miscommunication. There can be a repeated back-and-forth needed before a tool is even ready to demonstrate as a proof-of-concept.
Inspera offers a new AI-enhanced development workflow that empowers our customers to benefit from new interaction types in a much more efficient and cost-effective manner.
Taking advantage of trusted AI services through a controlled framework with safety mechanisms built in, Inspera’s development toolkit provides instant translation between pedagogical intent and technical execution. The development lifecycle for reaching a working proof-of-concept can be shortened from weeks or months to just a few hours.
We utilise natural language processing in order to describe the requirements of the interaction and desired outcomes in plain English. Our development tools leverage AI assistance where appropriate, focussed on generation of a proof–of-concept of the new interaction or question type in an environment where preview and testing is made easy, and we employ an iterative approach to refinement of the new question type.
Our human-language driven toolkit ensures that all the necessary information to produce a new interaction or question type is gathered up front, rather than guessing or filling in the blanks as developers work. This ensures that all key elements of the new interaction and the relevant subject matter are considered, alongside important core elements of every interaction – accessibility, usability, resilience, device compatibility and security.
Just a few examples of tools and interactions made possible by Inspera’s approach to building custom interactions and question types include:
