The funded project by Erasmus + has entered its third and last year where 8 institutional members of EBMA collaboratively work on the development of an Online International Progress Test. However, the Covid19 virus, starting in March 2020, has led to some project delays but after good discussions and reflections solutions were found in a constructive way.
A planned physical pilot administration with students to calibrate the second batch op test items, has been converted to an online test administration by using proctoring. All partner institutions were able to organize several online test sessions and overall all students were satisfied doing the test at home. The item bank with all European progress test items is now consisting of 1,405 items and ready for usage in the last pilot administrations with students before the end of the project. We will add new items developed by the support of automatic item generation.
The content of the items used in the first pilot has been extensively evaluated by analyzing the psychometric results and the student comments. Items that seemed to be very country specific or were misfunctioning have been identified and discussed in a meeting. Consequently, these were subject to change or have been withdrawn from the item bank. The same procedure will be executed for the last and remaining pilot round.
The development of guidelines for the implementation of the online international progress test for new partners entering the consortium have been developed, using a modified Delphi approach and a second iteration has been prepared. A sustainability plan is in progress which also includes a business model. A publication plan has been established and titles for papers have been agreed upon.
A start has been made on two papers. The project team looks forward to the planned multiplier event in Autumn 2021 where all project results will be presented and schools interesting in the Online International Adaptive Progress Test are invited to join this event.