Evolving project e-scape for national assessment.

In the opening paper in this Special Edition I outlined the major issues that led to the establishment of project e-scape. The project was intended to develop systems and approaches that enabled learners to build real-time web-based portfolios of their performance (initially) in design & technology and additionally to build systems and approaches to facilitate the web-based assessment of those portfolios. The project was commissioned by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) with additional 'buy-in' from Awarding Bodies-who were seen by QCA as the leading beneficiaries of a successful project. The project was designed in three phases. I have outlined-in the Introduction to this Special Edition-the early exploratory work that we undertook within phase 1, the aim of which was to prove the viability of the concept. This was achieved, and QCA then commissioned phase 2 with a brief to build a working prototype system and run it through a national pilot-testing programme in 2006. Age 15 was the target age-group, aligning as closely as we could with the Awarding Body requirements for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) that runs with age 16 learners. The successes of the phase 2 prototype-both as classroom activity and as reliable assessment-led QCA and Becta (the body responsible for funding ICT developments in schools) to commission phase 3 in which we explored the potential of the e-scape system for wider application. Specifically, we were required to demonstrate the transferability of the system to other curriculum areas beyond design & technology, and the scalability of the system if it were to be used for national assessment purposes, with hundreds of thousands of candidates. In this paper, I outline the approach that we adopted through the e-scape research; describe the major elements of the work both in terms of classroom/curriculum practice and in terms of new approaches to assessment; and analyse some of the key issues that arise from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]