Kendata test scoring service paves the way for major time savings
at Somerset Education Department
After many years of scoring the county’s school Year 6 and
Year 8 reading tests in-house, the Education Department of Somerset
County Council has out-sourced the work to Southampton-based
data-entry specialist, Kendata Peripherals. Council staff are
now looking forward to the prospect of having their time freed
up to focus on other tasks.
Since the late 1970s, most schools in Somerset have been using
the highly regarded Edinburgh Reading Test (ERT) series, published
by Hodder & Stoughton. These tests provide a diagnostic profile
of each pupil’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as a reading
age and standardised score.
After a year or two of scoring the tests manually, Somerset
County Council sought to ease the burden on teachers and automate
the process by using an optical mark reader (OMR), in conjunction
with the council’s mainframe computer. As well as speeding up
the test scoring procedure, the OMR meant that the council could
utilise separate test answer sheets, thereby enabling the question
booklets to be reused year after year and reducing costs.
That arrangement continued until 2000, when the council’s mainframe
came to the end of its life and the education department was
consequently forced to take a fresh look at the test scoring
process. The department concluded that the best option available
for the future would be to contract the work to an external
organisation.
During subsequent discussions with Hodder & Stoughton, Somerset
was put in touch with Kendata Peripherals, who had been providing
the publishing company with data-entry services for a number
of years. Kendata was already working with Hodder & Stoughton
on developing a scannable version of Edinburgh Reading Test
4 (ERT4), for which Kendata had designed and printed new answer
sheets to ensure compatibility with a scanner-based forms-processing
system.
Charles Knight, test publisher of Hodder & Stoughton’s Educational
Division, commented: As part of the process of restandardising
ERT4, we sent out test papers to schools across the country
and then piloted the whole scanner scoring system with Kendata.
They captured the data and fed it straight back to us, and it
all worked very smoothly.
Following the successful trial, Somerset decided to continue
to use the new scannable ERT4 tests, with Kendata providing
a bureau service for the design, print and scoring of the forms.
In both 2001 and 2002, Kendata printed some 7000 of the ERT4
answer sheets for Somerset, which the council then distributed
to the county’s schools. Teachers administered the tests in
the schools and returned the answer sheets to the council, just
as they had been doing each year since the early 1980s. The
answer sheets were then batched up and forwarded to Kendata
for scoring, with the results subsequently returned to Somerset
for processing and analysis.
The ERT4 test is designed for secondary school pupils, aged
11:7 to 16+, but Somerset also needed a scannable version of
ERT3, which is aimed at pupils aged 10 to 12. This was developed
especially for Somerset, and approximately 7000 ERT3 answer
sheets were also processed by Kendata in 2002.
We remain committed to removing any unnecessary burdens from
teachers, so some sort of central, automated scoring system
is essential,” said Graham Smith, assistant group manager of
the council’s Education ICT Group. “The arrangement with Kendata
should remove a significant burden from council staff, and as
we have a huge amount of work coming in from Key Stage tests,
the time saved on scoring the Edinburgh Reading Tests will be
very important to us in the coming months.
The design of the answer sheets continues to be refined by
Kendata, taking advantage of the flexibility offered by forms
processing technology. In particular, the efficiency of the
whole process was improved in 2002 by pre-printing pupil names
and other data at the top of the answer sheets, rather than
relying on the pupils themselves to write in the information
accurately.
One possible future development that is being looked at is
the electronic archiving of all the ERT answer sheets by Kendata
so that, in the event of a query about a test score, any pupil’s
answer sheet can be quickly called up and a PDF immediately
e-mailed back to Somerset Education Department for verification.
Building on this successful partnership, Hodder & Stoughton
is working with Kendata in offering the automated scoring service,
for ERT3 and ERT4, to all Local Education Authorities and Education
Action Zones from September 2002.
- ends -
7th August 2002 Ref. KE190A
|