Test Designer

Our mission is to serve teachers and students at the phase of examination and assessment at any time of the academic year and with any type of test. We believe that evaluation is not only a way to test knowledge, but it is also a way to generate new knowledge and cover the missing gaps from past classes. Assessment is an opportunity at many levels. We rely on principles of democracy and negotiation in the class.

Test Designer (TD)  is generator of differentiated or personalized tests and offers necessary routines to the optimize the time of the teacher spent on generating - carrying out - collecting - assessing a test. We have the following objectives:

O1: to ensure transparency and fairness to all students by removing teacher's change of subjectivity, while still keeping it as a process guided fully by the teacher.

O2: to support the digitalization of assessment during any time of the academic year

O3: to provide learning support from assessment and evaluations.

Test Designer is currently a non-profit entity ran by the teacher in physics and Founder, Mr. Sergiu Burlacu. During his 30+ years of teaching physics, IT and robotics he noticed a decrease in the motivation of students to learn more due to the usage of gadgets and simply, an overwhelming amount of information. He saw his students cheering up and leaving the class satisfied and new friends after trying Test Designer methodology. This is when he decided to test this methods on other teachers from disciplines of mathematics and chemistry. 

As the Founder of Researchista, the operating partner of Test Designer in Europe and the U.S.A, Dr. Burlacu de Paoli facilitates greatly our partnerships and communications with external partners outside the Netherlands and Moldova. Her role is instrumental in our coordinating the entire team and in ensuring that all processes related to different phases of the project are managed smoothly. She is a graduate of Maastricht University, Public Policy Programme.

Dr. Irina Burlacu de Paoli is a loyal and committed person. Once the application will be approved, herself and the Founder of Test Designer, Mr. Sergiu Burlacu will be fully engaged into carrying out all the necessary activities as being part of the Leap Project. We have been involved in a slightly similar activity stemming also from the USA and we have achieved the outcomes with success. 

A!EH is a hands-on collection tool aimed at learning from tests and helping instrumentation by transforming knowledge in curricula’s support. 

High workload and the quality of assessment are two core problems A!EH aims to address. Pardo et al. (2017) state that the discussion about offering little feedback to students to improve learning due to teachers’ high workload can be improved with modern technologies. We hope together to be able to increase teachers' motivation and reduce the amount of working hours related to testing. For example, to generate a test with unique values and options for the answers for a group of 30 students will take about 15 minutes in TD, which is significantly less time than a teacher trying to assemble a test on their own must spend. A!EH aims to reduce guesswork on students' performance and rely strictly on objective results and research.

In this new era of automation, students more than ever need to have their knowledge and skills appreciated at there fairest value to be assessed as competently as possible later on the labour market. Knowing that the process is fully automated makes the students feel that they are evaluated fairly. Families, the nucleus of the society, also appreciate that automation ensures that the future prospects of their children are evaluated fairly. Whereas teachers need secure assessment methods. Our high-quality automated testing provides that security. Involving all possible users in the product development will not only provide financial savings, but will also make A!EH stronger and better. At the beginning of the project, discussions will take place with teachers, pupils, parents and school management, as well as researchers. In second phase, researchers and teachers will be involved through focus groups and design thinking. In the last phase, both user groups will be able to test the product and help us adjust necessary aspects.

Once the test was generated (in TD) and completed, the teacher automatically receives an email that enables him/her to see the results of the test. The data is registered in Google forms, converted in MS Excel and then stores in the Google BigData Query. The following data is encrypted:

• the name of the students,
• the grade,
• the school and
• the country where the test takes place.

These and other related indicators will enable an international comparison among schools with various backgrounds, with various levels of preparation and countries.

Anyone subjected to testing is eligible subject to Test Designer.

Since the Test Designer methodology has been developed throughout 10 years as a result of multiple application during classes of physics, we have used mostly formative research to try operationalize our indicators that can serve our product's jump to the market. 

In this sense, we have interviewed students and teachers about how they have experienced exams and evaluations with Test Designer, as well as built case studies around students that were particularly fond of it.

Research shows that we can extend our methodology to other contexts, A!EH can be of great support in high school environment as well as it can be applied to: universities, learning engineering agencies, evaluation institutions (e.g. IELTS, Cambridge, SAT) and companies and corporations (e.g. employees evaluation based on tests and related the field with feedbacks and insights from A!EH) and education research institutes. 

We also did some foundational research, but not the extent to which we would hoped for. Moreover, the difference between Western and Eastern literature sometimes was an obstacle of communication among some team members, so we left this part of a later project. We very much hope to have an opportunity to carry out more literature review that will help the backbone of the programme. We have to delimit more among the different trends and patterns in teaching and learning and assessment that this methodology is part of and decide which one we will use the most.

Foundational research has served us well in trying to advance in the area of Learning Engineering and advancing into trying to measure the impact of Test Designer methodology on students' knowledge. Baker and Boser (2021) argue in their report on learning engineering opportunities that race, ethnicity, second-language status, gender, neurodiversity, disability status, urbanicity, and military-connected status can all impact effectiveness, but are often not collected or analyzed. While we are aware that Test Designer methodology together with the results from A!EH would not be covering for many of these criteria, we know for a fact that utilizing TD methodology removes social barriers by encouraging discussions and movement during the test. Since the students are very driven to solve their own tests, they are motivated or pulled to each other, placing the teacher in a role of a spectator of a performance pleasant to watch. Some of the feedbacks after the test are: “I never had an interest in physics, but after this test I know start to understand it!”. The melting pot of different intellectual faculties, different backgrounds and preparation levels is encouraging to teachers and creates a great foundation for A!EH

We also care about students' well-being. In this sense, we understood that we appreciate and would like to promote more positive pedagogy. Waters L. (2021) found that teachers that use positive pedagogy are able to legitimize action, and spread wellbeing. Positive education pedagogy creates change within the teacher, across classrooms, and throughout the school. 

If you can't measure it and prove it, it doesn't exist. We are a team of educators and researchers that truly believe in the power of research, yet somehow during the process of work and development of the Test Designer methodology, we ended up not measuring sufficiently the impact of various used parameters and the impact of the methodology as a whole on the life of the teacher and the student/pupil.

This is why we came up with the Assessment Express Hub (A!EH) to try cover this gap and even more, to aim to use research and evidence-based arguments in every step of the way of our growth. Due to limited resources,  mostly relied on feedbacks, case studies and interviews to obtain our credentials and proof that we are heading into the right direction, but it is time for us to take the entire thinking process and development onto the next level. 

Research is slow and time consuming, but we have to start somewhere. We hope that LEAP can help us to build an systematic approach into research that will provide us and to potential partners/investors an evidence-based case for our solution. Needless to say that being part of such a prestigious programme coming from MIT will not only strengthen our credibility, but also establish connections that we will cherish and treasure. Perhaps other interesting projects could result out of LEAP Program?

With your international program we could build a solid foundation, based on research to help children not only from the USA or Europe, but also from Africa, Asia or India. We believe in the strong impact of positive pedagogy, in a friendly environment and social equality that such open-book communication during an exam can bring. We believe that we can make a change together, otherwise we would still be nesting into our regions and try make a small-scale level impact. Instead, we dream big and we have a product that can bring a significant change, especially in times when students can write their essays in ChatGPT. LEAP Program will help us build the base for Test Designer to develop the second phase after A!EH and that is to develop an anti-plagiarism software that can identify the source of the words and prevent students from using ChatGPT for their own assignments. Oppositely, we hope to incentives students around the world to see the beauty of their own efforts and knowledge, to use their skills and capabilities later on the labour market and be proud of it.

A!EH project aims at carrying out research during LEAP project around the following research questions:

Rq1: To what extent, TD methodology has a bigger impact on teachers workload than a traditional method?

Rq2: To what extent, TD methodology manage to develop the autonomy of learning of the students compared to traditional methods?

Rq3: To what extent, TD methodology helps prevents and eradication of plagiarism (if such a culture is strong, especially at primary level)?

We would appreciate to receive research recommendations and guidance on where to place Test Designer methodology in the array of all learning engineering tools and techniques, would it rather belong to the assessment compartment or learning or both. Any other nuances related to the general overview of where we might stand in among the educational tools will help us build a more solid argument of where we are and where we would like to go. We have certainly gained some understanding ourselves by now of where we stand, but having your expertise on it can be of much help to gain a broader picture and build our processes more sustainably in the our long-term.

Our goal is to help reduce teachers' workload and also bias in evaluation process, hence to the first research question we would appreciate inputs from the Fellow researchers on the digitalization of assessment. There is a lot of progress in this realm, a lot of online testing going on, yet we have not encountered a similar methodology as Test Designer and we would like to work together on measuring the impact of it on teachers as a whole.

Another value proposition we hope to work more on with the LEAP experts is the impact of TD on the students, particularly the autonomy of learning. The self-determination theory clearly states that a child needs are fulfilled when 3 needs are accomplished and the need for autonomy and control is one of them (apart from the need of competency and connection). We would like to explore more the real of assessment and motivation, motivation and determination to learn more and be self-sufficient, be more confident and wanting to rely on own skills rather than copy/paste them from somewhere else.

Lastly, Test Designer is developed in Moldova and like many former Soviet countries, the culture of plagiarism is present still, not to mention that it is quite accentuated in some countries more than in others. Hence, we strongly believe that taking this dimension in education seriously is worth it and eradicating it or preventing it can have multiple benefits for the health of an individual and of a nation as a whole. This is why, democracy and negotiation principles are strongly supported. We hope that the outputs of the LEAP program will help round these core research questions up.

After obtaining all the valuable recommendations, we are open to change our strategy of work and of thinking to optimize out processes. We might have to change the entire way of operations as a follow-up of the LEAP Project sprint. 

During the LEAP project, we suggest putting the following things into action:

1) Create a routine questionnaire for teachers and students to be applied every single time a TD test is used (rq 1, 2, 3);

2) Organize 2-3 focus groups with students to test TD and collect feedback (rq2);

3) To create 2 control groups that in 12 weeks will be exposed to TD and traditional method of testing (rq3).

After the LEAP project, the sprint and collected results we suggest putting the following things in action:

1) Creating a business plan and customer personna;

2) Writing a white paper on Test Designer that contains all the feedback and conclusions from the sprint;

3) Set the foundations of a scientific paper on this particular type of assessment.

Test Designer is currently a non-profit organization because it provides a testing ground for an educational product and service, we would however like to become a viable social business that can help teachers and pupils all over the world. The LEAP Project sprint would be an indispensable contribution in the short and long-term for both, us as an organization and the solution we provide.

Short-term outcomes:

1) A clear picture on where we stand amongst the educational tools on evaluation;

2) Operationalized processes backed by research and evidence-based arguments;

3) A professional outlook and guidance on our weaknesses.

Long-term outcomes:

1) Transformation into a viable social business

2) Scaling 

3) Creating positive pedagogy and exam-friendly centers that bring joy and incentives to pupils.