Our Assessment Innovation Fund pilots: Bolton College

Shaping the future of learning and assessment

We’re on a mission to break boundaries in assessment with an investment fund to support and pilot new ideas on the future of assessment.

Bolton College

Bolton College is one of the North West's largest providers of vocational training and further education. The college enables individuals, businesses and communities within Bolton and surrounding areas to reach their potential. They provide courses for a wide range of people of all different ages and are proud to be able to offer hundreds of courses to suit everyone.

About the pilot

A 15-month pilot will test the efficacy and impact of their FirstPass platform. FirstPass is an online platform that has been developed by Bolton College to support learners and teachers with the formative assessment of open-ended questions. Using FirstPass, learners can respond to open-ended questions using free-form text which can be a single sentence, or many pages in length. FirstPass offers real-time feedback to learners as they compose their answers; allowing them to reflect and improve upon their answers before submitting them to their teachers for final review and commentary. Teachers across all six institutions will use FirstPass to set and mark formative assessments and check understanding and knowledge retention.

NCFE are a co-funder of the FirstPass together with the Ufi VocTech Trust which has been supporting the development of the platform with grant-funding and enrichment since 2019. Ufi VocTech Trust will continue to support the platform development, helping to extend the pilot period and enable deeper evaluation of the platform’s impact.

Key findings

82% of teachers stated that FirstPass will be an effective AI service for supporting them as they undertake formative assessment.

All teachers stated that a shared subject topic classifier was easier to train than doing the training on their own. When training subject topic classifiers on their own, 67% of teachers stated that their classifiers accurately labelled previously unseen text. For classifiers that were trained on a shared basis, this rose to 75%.

92% of learners stated that FirstPass correctly detected what they entered on the screen as they composed their responses to open-ended questions.

92% of learners said that the feedback from FirstPass helped them to compose better answers. All learners welcomed the immediacy of the feedback from the platform.

The FirstPass pilot study offers a compelling case for the adoption of AI-powered formative assessment tools. The platform's real-time feedback and crowdsourcing model show promise in addressing longstanding challenges in open-ended question assessment. While the study is not without limitations, its findings contribute to the ongoing conversation about the role of technology in education and the potential for AI to support teachers and learners. Overall, the FirstPass pilot study represents a significant step toward more efficient and effective formative assessment practices, with implications for educators and students alike. It paves the way for further exploration and development of AI-driven solutions in the field of education.