Project Quantum: tests worth teaching to
Created by Simon Peyton Jones
last edited May 08 2018 by Cynthia Selby
Project Quantum will help computing teachers check their students’ understanding, and support their progress, by providing free access to an online assessment system. The assessments will be formative, automatically marked, of high quality, and will support teaching by guiding content, measuring progress, and identifying misconceptions.
Teachers will be able to direct pupils to specific quizzes and their pupils’ responses can be analysed to inform future teaching. Teachers can write questions themselves, and can create quizzes using their own questions or questions drawn from the question bank. A significant outcome is the crowd-sourced quality-checked question bank itself, and the subsequent anonymised analysis of the pupils’ responses to identify common misconceptions.
By way of background here are
All the questions and quizzes are available on the Diagnostic Questions site (free registration required).
Quality is key. How do we know that the questions in the system are any good? The exciting thing about Quantum is that it’s a collaboration between leading experts in assessment (Cambridge Assessment, Durham Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring) and subject experts (CAS, Naace), plus our technology partner Diagnostic Questions. CEM has lots of ideas for how to use data from thousands of students taking thousands of questions to identify which questions work well and which do not. There are serious research questions here – no one has done this before – but no one is better placed to do this than CEM and CA.
On the CAS end, our content advisory group consists of
Quantum is generously funded for two years, by no-strings-attached grants from ARM, Google, and Microsoft. Without them it could not have happened. Thank you!
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