TAG Developments, the e-assessment division of Sherston Software Ltd, has won a contract to pilot its highly innovative Adaptive Comparative Judgement and LiveAssess assessment systems with Skolverket, the Swedish National Agency for Education. The pilot was awarded to TAG in October 2011 and will run until February 2012.

The context of the pilot will be to use TAG's technology in the delivery and assessment of National Tests in four key subject areas:

• English
• Design Technology
• Swedish for immigrants
• Swedish as a native language

TAG's LiveAssess assessment system was originally developed in partnership with Goldsmiths, University of London as part of a five year research project called 'e-Scape'. The tool allows teachers to create structured activities that provide students with a mechanism for capturing project based learning dynamically as it happens in the classroom and so is ideal for supporting coursework and other learning scenarios where capturing the process of learning, rather than just the final outcome is important. Within this pilot LiveAssess will be used to support the capture of project based learning in the context of Design Technology.

TAG's Adaptive Comparative Judgement system provides an unparalleled mechanism for assessing student work using the collective professional judgement of several judges, rather than relying solely on the judgement of a single marker. This approach dramatically reduces the influence of personal subjectivity on the assessments and thus increases the reliability of the assessment and can be used to assess a wide range of student evidence from scanned written scripts, through rich-media portfolios, to spoken responses, enabling highly reliable results whilst maintaining the validity/authenticity of the assessment.

This pilot will build on the successful use of Adaptive Comparative Judgement carried out through a number of pilots over the last two years by the QCDA (Key Stage 3 Writing Tests); the Scottish Qualifications Agency (English Essay marking); Ministry of Education Singapore (Media-rich student portfolios in Social Studies) and the Curriculum Council of Western Australian (end of school leaving exams).

For further details please contact Matt Wingfield, Managing Director, TAG Developments, on 0203 176 0394 or matt.wingfield@sherston.com