Caliber

Backstory

An oversimplification of Caliber is that it is a test students take to determine how ready they are for the future.

It is, as defined by the founder - “a series of assessments that students take throughout their schooling journey to determine their proficiency across the 10 skills”.

What are the skills? .. and what is the assessment?

The Skills

Caliber determines the future readiness of a student by assessing their proficiency levels across 10 transferable, measurable (levels 1-12) skills.

These skills are classified into 3 categories:

1. Research & Information Literacy
2. Thinking Critically
3. Communication Processes

Each skill strand has been defined for Grades 6 - 11.

The Assessment

The Caliber assessment is designed specifically to evaluate a student’s Research, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Communicative Writing abilities.

1. Students take the assessment at least twice in an academic year, typically with a gap of 3-4 months.

2. The first (baseline assessment), provides educators and students with valuable insights of skills abilities.

3. The rest (progress assessments), provide insights to reflect on the success of adaptations made to classroom practice, and progress in students’ skills-building journey.

After becoming inundated with the skills and the assessment, I conducted a workshop with the team to answer one simple question: What is Caliber really about?

We concluded that the assessment itself isn’t what Caliber is all about. Neither are the skills. They are pieces of a bigger served experience. An experience of growth and learning.

And so, I decided to zoom out and understand how this experience is served to Caliber’s most important stakeholders, The Educator and The Student.

Educator Journey

An educator’s experience with Caliber extends over 6 broad touchpoints, 1 of which is served through the digital product. The rest are served/self-served offline.

Educators only use the product to review student performance.

Student Journey

A student’s experience with Caliber extends over 4 broad touchpoints, 2 of which are served through the digital product. The rest are served/self-served offline.

Students use the product to take the assessment and review their performance.

Takeaways

1. Caliber is a combination of served and self-served experiences.

2. A majority of these experiences are executed outside of the digital product.

3. Educator and Student journeys are codependent (for ex. an educator can only review a student’s performance if they have completed the assessment).

Caliber exists today as an extension of the in-class relationship between an educator and a student. It is not a substitute.

In some cases, Caliber is used to supplement what is taught, while in other cases, it is used to inform what is taught.

Naturally, Caliber’s users bring to it a set of motivations and expectations, and I wanted to understand what these are.

User Research

I reached out to educators and students with varying degrees of experience with Caliber, to figure out their needs, motivations, and frustrations.

I created persona cards based on their responses. Since I wasn’t allowed to take or ask for pictures, I used the interviewees’ favourite movies/books as visual aid in each card.

I also used insights from my interviews/conversations with students and educators to create empathy maps.

This proved to be far more valuable in understanding what these users bring to Caliber, as well as what they need.

Empathy maps for a student and an educator.

Pains

Students’ lack of motivation; many students don’t buy into the idea of skill development and therefore don’t take Caliber seriously.

Student anxiety before and during the assessment; many students feel overwhelmed by the fact that it is a test and the isolated setting throws them off.

Lack of, and difficulty in monitoring student growth; most educators are worried about students not growing over time.

Gains

Relatable & identifiable skills; a student fully invested in the importance of the Caliber skills will buy into the idea of developing them.

Friendly & supportive testing environment; there’s no need for the Caliber assessment to feel daunting - it should be an enjoyable experience.

Reports focused on student growth;educators wan’t to monitor student growth - the reports should reflect that.

I now had enough insight into Caliber and its users to define the design opportunity at hand.

I also defined design principles that would form the basis for the desgin phase of this project.

Design Opportunity
How might we encourage students to enjoy skill building, and enable educators to monitor skill development?

Design Principles

Simplify the skills

The skills don’t have to be tedious. It is more important for students to understand what a skill means, rather than know its “scientific” name.

Be friendly

Nobody likes a know-it-all. Its important to get off the high horse and let the students know that Caliber is a friend.

Celebrate growth

Caliber is a journey. Educators need to feel like it is a journey worth being on for the long haul.

Simplifying the skills

At the time, each skill had

1. A (tedious) name
2. A (more tedious) description
3. No visual cues

Why would a student ever care about building skills that they can’t even name? Skills they can’t even describe? Skills they can’t even recognise?

This was a glaring need we had discovered during the user research phase. We knew we had to repackage the way the Caliber skills were presented to a student.

1. Simpler descriptions

We started out by simplifying the definition of each skill. The objective was simple: How do we enable a student to retain what each skill means?

The Caliber skill development team rewrote all descriptions keeping this objective in mind and we conducted a simple experiment to measure their retainability.

We recruited 20 students (from grades 6-11) and split them into 2 groups of 10 each.

Group A was given the original description of a skill, while Group B was given the simplified version.

Each group was then asked to explain what that skill meant to a member on the Caliber skill development team.

Each student’s account of the skill was marked either satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

2. Stickier identifiers

Next, we set out to give each skill a fun and sticky identifier. Here, the objective was: How do we enable a student to easily identify with the skills?

We distilled each skill down to one operative verb to make it easier for students to relate.

For example,
"Accurately Interpreting Information" → Decoding

We ended up with the following after applying that to the rest of the skills:

Seeking, Investigating, Strategizing, Writing, Presenting, Organizing, Fair Play, Synthesizing, Evaluating.

3. Skill badges

Finally, I decided to create badge like icons for each skill. The objective here was: How can we add interesting visual compliments to each skill?

I experimented with using abstract as well as literal elements. I also used this as an opportunity to start defining a colour palette for Caliber.

We figured that abstract elements worked better for what we were trying to achieve. They felt more playful, and put focus on the act rather than on the ones performing it.

The Caliber Skills, new & improved

Skill Cards

Now that each skill had a simple name, a simpler descriptor, and a fun badge, the final step was to package all of these together for students to identify with.

I proposed creating Skill Cards, that we could also use as promotional material. The objective here was: How do we make the skills feel tangible?

The Caliber Skill Card Deck

The Caliber Skills Pack

Typography & Colours

While designing the skill badges and the skill cards, I began defining some visual design guidelines for Caliber, namely an atomic typography system and a colour palette.

I started with typography and defined 9 presets, named 1 through 9. These are the atomic typographic units from which all of Caliber’s typography stems.

Visualizing the results

We wanted to explore ways in which we could deviate from the typical methods of visualizing results. Report cards are boring - Caliber did not want to be.

We identified 4 questions that needed to be addressed by the Caliber results.

What are a student's skill levels?

We decided to lean in on the skill cards for this one. Imagine having a virtual deck of cards that can be rotated, shuffled, re-shuffled, etc.

How is a student/class growing over time?

Caliber is a journey of growth. How do we visualize that growth in a way that is interesting yet intuitive? We played around with many different kinds of visualization techniques before locking in on a spider chart.

How is progress over an academic year?

Educators typically serve a class over an academic year and we wanted them to easily examine how a class is doing over the course of an academic year.

What are the ares of concern/celebration?

We decided to visualise skill proficiency distribution to allow educators to identify if there are any skills they need to worry about - as well as those that they can celebrate.

The Product

With all the visualizations figured out, the final question we wanted to answer was: How does a student/teacher easily access Caliber’s data?

For students; a web application that they can use to take a Caliber assessment whenever available, as well as access their skills data.

For educators; a web application that they can use to access their students’ skills data.

Caliber

Caliber is an assessment service that measures a student’s future-readiness (ability to thrive in increasing complex environments).

It provides students with data about their future-readiness and educators with relevant insights to guide skills-building at school.

Students The Assessment Students complete an adaptive online test that has been pre-scheduled over the course of an academic year.

Students The Skills Deck After every test, students can view their skill levels (1-12) using an interactive virtual deck.

Students The Growth Tracker Students can view their growth over time using an interactive spider chart. The idea here is for students to be able to visualise their future-readiness.

Educators Overview Table After every test, educators can see how grades/classes have performed against a proficiency benchmark.

Educators Distribution Board Educators can determine the skills that need to be focused on, as well as those that need to be celebrated by seeing how proficiencies are distributed.