SBIR Phase II: An End User Authoring Tool for Open and Intelligent Technology-Enhanced Assessments.

This SBIR Phase II effort will create transformative open tools to enable affordable access at scale to high quality assessments (problems & questions) for foundational subjects in secondary and post-secondary education. The explosion of online student audiences, rapid growth of Open Educational Resources (OER), and the need to support individual learners are creating an unprecedented demand for digital assessments. Assessment authoring tools today are controlled by large organizations, require advanced skills and proprietary assessment delivery platforms with restrictive collaboration features. This inequity is particularly pronounced with respect to technology-enabled assessments (TEAs) which are sophisticated, digital assessments that enable deeper learning. This effort will democratize the process of authoring and sharing TEAs through the creation of intuitive end user tools that will enable educators without advanced technical skills to author and share TEAs. This has the potential to disrupt the status quo by empowering educators to take charge of the assessment creation and distribution landscape with ground-breaking tools that enable easy authoring and distribution of sophisticated TEAs without being restricted by a proprietary assessment system. Eventually, this will empower educators at scale by triggering the evolution of a peer-to-peer marketplace around the need for assessments, and impact hundreds of thousands of learners in secondary and tertiary education settings. This project will follow through on two principal innovations. The first is an end-user tool that will dramatically reduce the time and expertise required to author technology-enhanced assessments. The tool will facilitate intuitive authoring of TEAs by using symbolic representation of programming constructs. The second innovation is a new standard for representation of technology-enhanced assessments that makes them usable in any delivery platform, thus making the assessments platform-neutral. This effort will also advance the frontiers of authoring beyond individual assessments to the creation of adaptive assessment pathways that will provide personalization for diverse learners. It will explore novel technologies including the representation of TEAs as intelligent and portable objects that are interoperable with disparate assessment platforms through application programming interfaces. The research studies will provide insight into how the proposed innovations can make authoring of TEAs more efficient while lowering the skills barrier for educators, and the degree to which such TEAs are effective in eliciting student reasoning and thinking processes in foundational subjects. This will be achieved through a combination of usability and validation studies in partnership with secondary and post-secondary educators drawn from different institutions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.