0 to 1 product in the making
Common Assessments
What are common assessments?
In plain terms, common assessments are district/state examinations conducted in countries like the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, among others. All schools and their students are obliged to participate in these, which are managed by the government at a predetermined date and time or over a specific duration.
Story time
User need
Opportunity
Slide into their DMs
The challenge
The bigger challenge
Challenge accepted
One last thing..
Let's get started! But first, RESEARCH
Common Assessments was a relatively new concept to us in India, hence we had a bunch of questions!
Current implementation of common assessments in real life?
Who creates these assessments?
Who distributes these assessments? How?
Who administers these assessments?
Read, talk, infer!
TL;DR
Worked with our UXR team to unravel the Common Assessment framework in Brazil and the US
Regular calls with the Board of education, Parana to understand the usecase and requirements better
User interviews with District admins to understand the user need better
Inferences
After some research, we were able to determine the broader framework of how these assessments are conducted.
Step 1:
District admin and their team of curriculum coaches create the assessment
Step 2:
They then distribute these assessments to each school for the relevant subject and grade
Step 3:
A team of proctors or as they are called in Portuguese, "aplicadores" are assigned a few days before the assessment day. They are responsible for administering the assessment in each class
Step 4:
Proctors start the assessment in the examination hall and end it at the given time.
Step 5:
An aggregate report is sent to the District admins to get a performance across schools, teachers and standards (standards are curriculum topics determined by the curriculum coaches for each school year)
Solutioning
With this, I identified 4 phases to solve for:
Creation
How can we enable the district admin and curriculum coaches create assessments efficiently?
Distribution
How can we help them distribute these assessments to schools and proctors in the quickest way possible?
Administering
How can we create an experience for proctors such that there's little prior education required?
Aggregate reports
What should be included in these reports? What are the questions the admins want answers to with these reports?
Explorations on the direction we should take
Should we build a whole new vertical?
Given the time constraint, should we leverage features we currently have for the framework above and add nuances to those?
Should we think big and solve for not just Brazil but also US, UK and other focus countries?
Phase 1: Creation
Persona: Admins, Curriculum coaches
Insight: We know that the assessments are created by a centralised team called the Curriculum coaches.
We also know that these curriculum coaches want to easily create assessments based on standards and skills.
Problem to solve: How can we simplify assessment creation in this phase?
Should we include AI generation of such assessments? Challenge here was they are not yet very trustworthy of AI for an assessment formal and large scale as Common Assessment. So we discarded this idea.
We have a library of over millions of quizzes. Some of them have been tagged manually with the relevant skill by other teachers. Could we leverage that? The challenge here was that the supply of such standard based quizzes was low. Should we increase the supply maybe?
We decided to pick the 2nd approach. We have a dedicated team that works on discovery and supply of content. They were onboard to add skills and standards to assessments of the relevant grades and subjects.
For more controlled assessment creation, we also enabled the creators to add tags to the assessment themselves.
Phase 2: Distribution
Persona: Admins, Curriculum coaches
Insight: We know that popular practice for Distribution of these assessments is via Google drive.
Problem to solve: How do we enable distribution of the common assessment created on Quizizz?
Should we replicate the Google drive experience on Quizizz? We have a feature called Teams. Should we maybe leverage those by adding subfolders in them? This would required considerable dev effort for the timeline we were working under.
Should we just generate an assessment link and let the admins distribute it as they do outside of Quizizz in real life? Challenge here was that this would mean the same activity would be used for all 256K students. This would pose some further challenges:
Overload on the same activity from a technical point of view
Filters on the aggregate report such as class, school, teacher would be difficult in the same activity
One of our business goals was to acquire more users from the District. Getting them to sign up to Quizizz to able to start the assessment on the required date and time seemed like a good opportunity to do so.
Pre-create a team of proctors/teachers on an admin account with a csv shared by the admin. Admin could then share the common assessment in the team. This csv would have the student, teacher, class and proctor roster.
We went for the 3rd approach as that seemed the most feasible for our MVP version.
Phase 3: Administer
Persona: Proctors
Insight: The previous tools tested by Parana govt were not user friendly, required heavy education prior to the assessment. Not ideal because there can be changes in the proctor list up until the last day before the assessment.
Problem to solve: Create an experience which is intuitive and self explanatory so it saves on coordination between proctors and admins.
Our solution for Brazil assessments were to create proctor accounts on Quizizz and share them with the admin who thereafter share with the required personnel. Proctors then log in on the day of the assessment with the credentials shared with them and start and end the assessment for the respective classes.
Phase 4: Aggregate report
Persona: Admins, Curriculum coaches
Insight: The core goal of these assessments is to measure student and teacher performance across schools in a district. Admins and curriculum coaches also want to understand areas of weakness and inform instruction accordingly in the upcoming semesters to prepare them for the final summative exam.
Problem to solve: What all should be included in the reports?
Performance across
Schools
Performance across
Teachers
Performance across Standards
Some Wireframes
With this, we set on to brainstorming solutions and wireframing
Final Designs Key Screens!
And we were set to slay in Parana, Brazil!
P.S: Can walk through the detailed flow and designs in person
Admin picks a quiz from our library and creates one - makes a common assessment out of it
Sets the configurations such as start time, end time, team of proctors, reporting choices etc
Once the common assessment is created, the admin lands on the assessments page that gives an overview of all the scheduled, live and completed assessments, along with live tracking.
Proctors on the other hand will be see the common assessment banner on their homepage, a week prior to the start time.
Live dashboard fro proctors when they start the assessment for their class
A glimpse of the student gameplay side
And much more in the Figma walkthrough
And our efforts paid off!!
