'A Quantum Leap': Crowd sourcing assessment

Mon 19 March 2018

Downing College

In September 2014, the Department for Education launched an entirely new national curriculum for Computing, replacing Information and Communication Technology. Uniquely in the world, computer science is now taught to every child, at every level form primary onwards. The change gave schools a huge challenge, amounting to the introduction of an entirely new subject at school, and one in which few teachers have enough subject knowledge, let alone well-tested pedagogy.

One powerful way to support teachers is to provide them with a corpus of high-quality quizzes, to use in formative assessment. Assessment items are usually written by experts, and filtered by field trials. This is expensive, and yields only small repositories of items, often subject to restrictions regarding availability. Quantum starts from the opposite end of the spectrum: could we crowd-source Computing questions, and filter them by analysing the results of millions of question attempts on thousands of questions taken by hundreds of thousands of students? Then we could build a large corpus, available for free, to everyone, forever.

Project Quantum is both a research project (can we really get lots of high-quality questions this way?) and a delivery project (can we make the lives of classroom computing teachers better, soon?). The two are symbiotic: the research drives quality metrics, which teachers can use when selecting items; the data from live usage at scale drives the research.

If Quantum is successful, it will be useful this year and next year; in other countries as well as the UK; at every level from primary to A level; and in maths, science, English and history as well as computing. Scalable interventions like this are hard to come by.

At this Cambridge Assessment Network seminar, Professor Simon Peyton Jones FRS and Miles Berry will explain the thinking behind Project Quantum, and describe how it is all working out in practice.

Cost: Free