Q-Labs

Pearson North America

Creating custom tests for teachers from peer-rated content

The Challenge

Creating effective tests for students is very time consuming

Teachers typically have a lot of work to do and little spare time. During one of our team's collaborative sessions it emerged that one of the most time-consuming tasks teachers face is the creation of tests that sufficiently and accurately test the abilities of their students.

Tests need to be original enough that students can't cheat by looking at the previous year's paper, and effective enough that they sufficiently measure the abilities of the students.

Design Highlights

  • We had looked previously at platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow, which provide valuable repositories of information, only for a different audience. We tried to imagine what a platform designed for teachers would look like.

    • What would Stack Overflow or GitHub for teachers look like?

  • We wanted to create a platform where teachers can easily compose their own tests, by searching for questions that other teachers have created, and that have been up-voted by others as being effective.
  • Teachers could also write their own questions, that others could share and vote on. In this way, authors of questions also get to see how effective their questions are being
  • Cheating is controlled by limiting access to the service to registered teachers. It also lets teachers see how often questions have been used by others, especially in the same institution, so that they can avoid repetition.
  • In the same way that source code can be forked, questions can be derived from others, to tailor them to the particular needs of that teacher's class. Other teachers are then able to pick the most appropriate version of the question to them, such as the one with the right difficulty level, or that has been voted up the most.
  • Questions can then be collected to form a test. The time taken for each question, along with the difficulty of each question is available, to ensure that the teacher can create a test appropriate to their class's abilities, and the time available for the test.

Sample wireframes:

Hi-fidelity mockups: