assesement – Page 6 – National Assessment and Examinations Center

NAEC in 3rd FLIP+ annual online event, 11th – 12th June 2020

The FLIP+ e-assessment community was officially launched as a non-profit association in June 2019.

It grew from first conversations dating back to January 2017 between the official education assessment bodies from four countries (France-Luxembourg-Italy-Portugal: hence the acronym) who were seeking solutions to common challenges in e-assessment. The assessment center (CAEd) from Brazil joined this initial group in 2018, and ever since several other institutions and bodies from many countries have expressed their interest in the initiative. Georgia Joined in 2019.

NAEC became the member of international FLIP+ E-assessment Community in 2019 to discuss and share challenges and success stories of e-assessment project. As a community member, NAEC can share the experiences in e-assessment content development, as well as in TAO open source development by composing extensions for the platform (e.g. portable computer interaction for the development of different interactive technology-enhanced items, reporting features for the platform, offline version for test delivery and etc.). NAEC can work on certain extensions for the platform in cooperation with other countries, thus sharing the budget for the development, or exchange already developed extensions free of charge.

3rd FLIP+ annual online event, 11th – 12th June 2020 (Link)

During its third international FLIP+ online event , the FLIP+ association gathered over 100 participants from 50 different institutions working in the field of educational assessment. Participants joined in from 24 countries as well as from IEA and OECD.

Under the FLIP+ motto of “sharing”, participants were able to learn about the e-assessment experiences of countries like Denmark, Georgia, Lithuania and Norway and gain insights about developments in six other FLIP+ member institutions. Work undertaken this year related to the FLIP+ Item Library was also presented. It should be recalled that the first ideas to set up the item library were initially discussed during the 2019 annual event in Rome. A year later, participants greatly welcomed the live demo of the initial prototype of the Item Library platform which showed where the items would be stored, how they could be accessed, reviewed, worked upon and shared.

Publication about NAEC presentation on the 3rd FLIP+ annual online event, 11th – 12th June 2020 (Link)

Georgia: Assessment for Development (Link)

MOU between NAEC and SEC

The National Assessment and Examinations Center of Georgia (NAEC) signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the State Examination Center of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SEC)

On 20 May 2020, Sophia Gorgodze –Director of the National Assessment and Examinations Center of Georgia (NAEC), Maleyka Abbaszade – Chairperson of SEC’s Board of Directors, as well as the senior executives of both parties met in a video format.

During the meeting, the parties expressed satisfaction with the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), discussed the progress of the first stage of this partnership in the following areas and shared mutual expectations of the next stage, as outlined in the MoU:

SEC’s support on the development of an item bank of the Teachers Certification Exams for the Azerbaijani language and literature teachers working in Georgian secondary schools with Azerbaijani as the language of instruction;
Review of the SEC’s Georgian language test items for school-leaving exams (grade 9 and 11) by the NAEC;

It should be noted that the assessment instrument constructed with the SEC’s support on Teachers Certification Exams for the Azerbaijani language and literature teachers working in Georgian secondary schools with Azerbaijani as the language of instruction will be used for differentiating and rewarding performance as a part of the Azerbaijani language and literature teachers’ certification.

The following projects are expected in the next phase of this mutual cooperation:

Organization of online item development training by the NAEC aimed to improve the Georgian language assessment by Georgian language teachers working in the secondary schools of Azerbaijan.

Provision of online learning and teaching resources as well as practice tests by the SEC for the Azerbaijani language and literature teachers working in Georgian secondary schools with Azerbaijani as the language of instruction;
Exchange of used exam papers available in English and Russian on different subject areas;

Sharing best practices between SEC and NAEC through regular video-conferences. Parties also discussed the characteristics of exams held during the pandemic and shared country specific challenges in test administration and contextualized solutions.

Source:

(Publication in Georgian)
(Publication in Azerbaijan and English Languages)

Project : Assessment for Development

The Government of Georgia in June 2019 has signed Loan Agreement for financing the implementation of Innovation, Inclusion and Quality Project (I2Q Project) with the World Bank[1]. The Project development objectives are to (i) expand access to preschool education; and (ii) improve the quality of education and the learning environments.

Project – Assessment for the Development is under I2Q project component 2, Subcomponent 2.4 – Development of a National Assessment Framework. It aims to implement census-based e-assessment (fully online mode) for the public schools of Georgia. The goal of assessment is to measure students’ achievements towards the national curriculum and track their progress. About 150 000 students of 4th, 6th and 10th grades will be assessed in literacy and numeracy every year. Students, their teachers, parents, corresponding schools and educational authorities will receive the automated e-reports on the assessment results, in order to support data-driven decision-making processes on individual, classroom, school and national level.

The initial phase of the project has already started in 2019 and draft framework for the assessment has been elaborated, as well as e-tests in literacy and numeracy for 4^th and 6^th grades. Two pilot phases have been planned for 2020 in order to try-out the content of the tests, to trial the platform and develop business processes for the e-assessment.

NAEC already has hired the staff, exclusively for the Assessment for Development project: project manager, project assistant, TAO administrators, system administrator, developer, literacy and numeracy experts.

The first pilot took place in February 2020. 6 000 students from 59 schools participated in the pilot in order to try-out the items and online delivery platform.

The items were created and assembled in the tests:

5 tests for the numeracy in 6^th grade. Each test comprised 20 items. The items were developed based on the national curriculum of the 6^th grade math;
4 tests were developed for the 4^th grade numeracy, with 25 items each. The items were developed based on the national curriculum of the 4^th grade math.
10 texts, with 14 items in each, were developed to test literacy skills in the 4^th grade.
10 texts were developed to assess 6^th grade literacy skills, each text included 8-9 items to assess reading and writing skills for the 6^th grade, as defined by the national curriculum of Georgian language and literature.

Students’ responses were analyzed and the items were edited based on the psychometric analysis. The set of the tests were assembled for the second phase of the pilot.

Project team analyzed existing test authoring and delivery platforms and selected OAT (Open Assessment Technologies) TAOTesting open Source eassesement software (TAO). TAO platform enables to create technology-enhanced items (TEIs) and ensures complete content interoperability. It offers: item authoring, test creation, scheduling and delivering tests online on a nation-wide scale, managing test-takers and user access, collecting and saving students responses, automatically grading candidates closed-question responses and exporting the data for further use.

Community edition of TAO platform is installed on the local Education Management Information System (EMIS) servers. EMIS and NAEC provide the hosting and delivery services for the platform.

Version 1.0 of e-reporting and e-scoring modules have been developed and integrated with TAOtesting platform. E-reporting module generates the reports for student, teacher and school based on the data collected from the student responses. E-scoring module enables the human scorer to score the student responses collected from TAO testing platform. Both modules are ready for the trial in the 2^nd pilot of the project.

The second pilot is planned in autumn 2020, involving 300 public schools of Georgia. It aims to try-out the tests (instead of trying-out the items in the first pilot), to test human scoring and e-reporting system and its compliance with Tao platform.

[1] (Link)