BrightPath
A roadmap to reflective and independent learning.
Project overview
Industry
Education
Tools
Zoom
Miro
Canva
Trello
Timeline
8 weeks
Role
Service Designer
Design Researcher
Team of 8
Project Type
Collaborative Client Project
Interactive Educational Tool
End-to-end development
Challenge
Traditional self-assessment methods often lack structure and meaningful engagement, particularly for younger learners.
Students: Found self-assessment tasks unclear, uninspiring, and difficult to relate to their learning objectives.
Teachers: Struggled to implement consistent, meaningful self-assessment practices within the constraints of busy classroom schedules.
These issues often left students unable to take ownership of their learning and limited teachers’ ability to provide targeted, effective feedback.
Educators needed a tool to:
Guide students through self-reflection aligned with cognitive development.
Provide clear, structured data on learning outcomes for both students and teachers.
Enhance motivation and engagement in the learning process.
Outcomes
BrightPath enhances metacognition, self-evaluation, and learning outcomes through a colour-coded system linked to Bloom's Taxonomy. It aligns educational practices with children's cognitive and emotional development, empowering them to reflect on their learning journey effectively.
85% of students reported increased confidence in reflecting on their progress.
50% improvement in articulating progress and identifying gaps.
35% increase in motivation and engagement of SEND children and vulnerable groups.
Teachers found the framework easier to implement and observed greater student engagement in learning tasks.
Improved outcomes: statutory and deepening of the curriculum
Discover
What motivated this project?
Importance of Formative Assessment:
John Hattie’s Research (2012): Formative assessment has an average effect size of 0.90 on student learning, making it one of the most effective strategies for improving achievement. It emphasises that regular, structured assessment helps students understand their progress and areas for improvement.
Education Endowment Foundation (EEF): Feedback based on assessment improves learning by an average of 8 months of additional progress annually, particularly when linked to a clear success criteria.
Equity in Accessing Learning Objectives:
UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report (2020): Over 250 million children worldwide struggle to meet basic literacy and numeracy milestones. A structured approach to self-assessment ensures that learners of varying abilities can access the curriculum objectives more effectively.
Department for Education (UK): Highlighted in their 2019 report that students with access to differentiated assessment tools achieve higher outcomes, as they can reflect on their progress in ways that match their abilities.
Assessing Gaps in Learning Post-COVID-19:
OECD (2021): The pandemic resulted in significant learning losses globally, with up to 50% less progress in math and literacy for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Effective formative assessment tools like BrightPath help to identify and bridge these gaps.
What were the project aims?
Empower Students Through Formative Assessment:
To develop a structured, formative self-assessment tool that enables students to reflect on their progress, identify areas for improvement, and set realistic goals.
Ensure Equitable Access to Learning Objectives:
To create a tool that accommodates learners of all abilities, ensuring every child can engage with curriculum objectives effectively.
Bridge Gaps in Learning Post-COVID-19:
To identify and address gaps in student knowledge caused by pandemic-related disruptions.
Foster a Growth Mindset:
To encourage students to view their learning as a progression, building resilience and self-awareness through reflective practices.
Support Teachers in Differentiated Instruction
To provide educators with a tool to guide reflective practices while reducing the time burden of manual assessments or unnecessary marking.
Background
I had worked for years in one of the largest primary schools in Kent, with a population of over 900 pupils. We had 51 languages spoken in the school and 33% of pupils eligible for free school meals. The school is placed in the top 10% of the most deprived areas nationally and 49% of the pupil premium children were also Special Educational Needs (SEND). With these statistics comes many challenges; particularly in the classroom and this enhanced the need to be innovative in order for all children to succeed. 1 in 5 children were leaving primary school without the ability to read and write fluently and without the necessary arithmetic skills to succeed in secondary school.
Our OFSTED report highlighted that our teachers’ ability to stretch all learners in lessons was not up to scratch; staff had the pupils best interests at heart, but the current frameworks were clearly not working; with many teachers unsure of how to assess the children accurately and the majority of students only showing surface-level understanding of their own learning. After speaking to other schools across the trust and in the wider community; we found that we were not alone and that this was clearly an area that many schools were struggling with. Schools needed to break through the glass ceiling and find a way to help children of all backgrounds, abilities and needs succeed at their own pace.
Research Methods
In-depth Interviews:
Participants: 20 teachers and 40 students across three schools.
Structure: Semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions.
Focus Areas:
Current self-assessment practices.
Challenges faced during self-evaluation.
Desired features in a digital self-assessment tool.
Classroom Observations:
Conducted 20 classroom observation sessions across various subjects (Math, English, Science, Art & DT) in three schools.
Objective: Observe students’ interaction with existing self-assessment tools and identify pain points.
Workshops and Co-Creation Sessions:
Student Workshops: 10 interactive sessions with 5-7 students each.
Activities: Brainstorming, role-playing, and storyboard creation.
Focus: Understand how students interpret self-assessment and what motivates them.
Student Insights
Difficulty Understanding Objectives
Many students struggled to connect learning objectives with their work. For example, younger students found terms like "analyse" confusing. This was particularly prevalent in students working below their expected level.
Motivation Gaps
Traditional self-assessment methods felt like chores. Students struggled to assess their learning after a lesson had already taken place, responding to teacher’s marking with ‘I’m not sure’ or at times guessing. Students desired more interactive and visual tools.
Emotional Impact:
Negative self-assessment experiences led to frustration, especially when feedback was unclear or harsh. Many students working below expected level assumed they had performed badly and lacked the motivation to push themselves further.
Review of current statistics:
Analysed current statistics across 5 schools between 1 and 5 form entry.
Focus Areas:
SEND and vulnerable children
Gap analysis
Grading across all year groups
Key Findings
Educator Insights
Need for Structured Tools
Teachers expressed a need for consistent, structured methods that were consistent and proven to work. The majority of teachers admitted that they struggled to know how best to assess the children when they were all at such varying levels and needs.
Time Constraints
Assessing each student's progress manually was time-consuming. Children forget the lesson once it’s over and the teachers have to spend hours looking through their work for each lesson to assess their understanding. Educators needed efficient ways to gather and analyse data.
Personalisation
They wanted tools that adapted to different learning styles and needs to ensure that they are able to meet the needs of all learners, with no one left behind and all children adequately challenged.
Affinity Mapping: From Insights to Themes
We organised interview and observation data into clusters using affinity mapping. This method helped us identify patterns and prioritise features for BrightPath:
Themes Identified:
Clarity and Comprehension:
Students needed clearer, more relatable self-assessment criteria.
Progress Tracking:
Both students and teachers wanted a way to visualise progress over time.
Positive Reinforcement:
Encouragement played a critical role in motivating students to persist in their learning, even when facing challenges.
Teacher Support:
Teachers needed tools that were simple to use, streamline assessment and provide actionable insights.
Design Opportunity:
How might we help students develop meaningful self-assessment skills that foster reflection, motivation, and goal-setting while providing teachers with actionable insights to personalise learning?
Turning point
At a critical stage in the design process, the team explored various pedagogical frameworks, including Bloom's Taxonomy, constructivism, and cognitive behavioural models. This exploration helped align the platform with key user needs: clear self-assessment, progress tracking, positive reinforcement, and teacher support. After evaluating the frameworks, the team chose Bloom’s Taxonomy as the backbone for structuring learning objectives and assessments, while integrating elements of constructivism and behaviorism for engagement and motivation. This decision marked a turning point in creating a cohesive, adaptable learning experience for BrightPath.
Define
Putting Pedagogy into Action
Bloom's taxonomy is a hierarchical classification system that categorises levels of human cognition, or thinking, learning, and understanding.
Breaking it down
Each stage of Bloom’s Taxonomy is associated with specific action verbs (e.g., recall, analyse, evaluate, create). These verbs make learning objectives clear and measurable, guiding both teachers and students on what is expected at each level of cognitive development.
By using the verbs, we can scaffold learning, guiding students through a structured progression from basic recall (e.g., name, list) to higher-order thinking (e.g., evaluate, create).
Overall, Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs provide a clear, actionable framework that enhances the planning, execution, and assessment of learning
Bloom’s Taxonomy guided our design, ensuring the platform covered all cognitive stages:
Remembering:
Students recall key facts through prompts, quizzes or pre-assessment at start of lessons.Understanding:
Reflective questions help them explain their learning.Applying:
Practical tasks allow them to use knowledge in new contexts.Analysing:
Guided reflections help identify strengths and weaknesses.Evaluating:
Students compare their work against rubrics or peer feedback.Creating:
Goal-setting tools enable students to plan and produce original work.
Develop
To break down Bloom’s Taxonomy into different levels of cognitive complexity in student learning; we discussed a colour-coded system—Red, Orange, Green, and Purple.
Red: Represents foundational knowledge, typically linked to the lower levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, such as Remembering. These levels focus on recalling facts and comprehending basic concepts.
Orange: Corresponds to Understanding, where students begin to use their knowledge in practical ways and are emerging into the expected stage.
Green: Represents expected cognitive levels such as Applying, where students can confidently apply what they have learned to a task successfully.
Purple: A colour for advanced mastery, indicating the highest levels Evaluating, Analysing and Creation, where students assess ideas critically and generate new concepts or solutions and can even synthesise information into innovative work or new ideas.
We began to design an in-class system based on colour coding Bloom’s Taxonomy in practice; taking the learning objective and breaking it down in to the four stages of cognitive learning. The verbs were available to help teachers incorporate the correct language for each stage. This could be applied to all subjects including core and non-core.
Students are asked to pre-assess at the beginning of the lesson using a colour and then again at the end of the lesson.
Putting it to the test
We asked 12 teachers spanning years 1-6 to plan the following half term of lessons using the new framework; breaking down the learning objectives using Blooms taxonomy.
Between our team of 8, we observed 112 lessons, covering all subjects in the curriculum. Our observations were carried out throughout the 6 weeks focusing on:
Children’s clarity of assessment
Measurable progression
Motivation and challenge
Teacher support
384
students
112
lessons
6
weeks
Results
What worked?
Students:
Engagement: Students responded positively to the colours and visual tools.
Comprehension: Simplified language improved understanding and saw a signifiant rise in participation and motivation.
Understanding: Students demonstrated confidence when reflecting on their learning, referring back to the colours at the end of the lesson, and found the task easier to achieve due to the clear, broken-down steps.
Teachers:
Planning: Teachers found their planning time decrease dramatically due to the structure of the framework.
Support: Assessment was easier to follow and teachers feedback reflected that they could help more children as they knew their starting and ending points.
What needed improving?
Students:
Assessment stages: Many students entered lessons with no prior knowledge and there needed to be an assessment stage to reflect that- rather than starting on red.
Repetition: Having the colours mentioned throughout the lessons is essential and embedded them more effectively, a small number of teachers who did this had more quality in the assessment response from children.
Teachers:
Display: Teachers wanted a permanent display in classrooms to refer to in lessons; as it linked to each subject and they were having to explain multiple times for children who forgot.
Effort recognition: Some children cannot meet expected criteria despite maximum effort, and teachers worry the lack of recognition may leave them disheartened.
Designing the Solution
Classroom display
Problem: Both teachers and students required a permanent display for the BrightPath framework to refer back to across all lessons. For the students it was vital to know where they had started and ended the lesson to see their progression and to discuss next steps and they also needed a colour to reflect when they entered a lesson with no understanding whatsoever.
Solution: The coloured ladder display provides a consistent framework for evaluating the performance of pupils in relation to the national expectations. Teachers confidently used the terms greater depth, expected, working towards and working below across all subjects. White/empty colour was added for those who had no knowledge of the learning.
Children were able to assess at the beginning and end of the lesson and were motivated to ‘climb the ladder’
Effort faces
Problem: Teacher and student feedback highlighted the concern that there was no reflection for students who contribute significant effort in the lesson but may not have made significant progress. There needed to be a way of recording how hard they tried in that lesson and that it counts for something- particularly to instil growth mindset and motivation.
Solution: The faces are designed to be recorded at the end of the lesson for children to reflect on their effort and to show how hard they had tried. Students suggested that emojis felt familiar and fun to use. This also allowed teachers to pick up on students who hadn’t made much effort and find out why.
Deliver
Implementation and Launch
We partnered with 4 select schools for pilot programs. The phased rollout included:
Training Sessions: For teachers to integrate BrightPath into their assessment strategies.
Classroom Support: Onboarding workshops for students to familiarise themselves with the platform.
Quantitative insights:
85%
students reported improved confidence in reflecting on their learning.
50%
improvement in articulating progress and identifying gaps.
35%
increase in motivation and engagement of SEND children and vulnerable groups.
BrightPath in action
Children discussing their assessment at the beginning of the lesson. BrightPath displayed on the board.
BrightPath teacher training, takes place every half term to receive feedback and develop.
BrightPath colours embedded in worked examples, teachers colour-coding and referring to these throughout the lesson.
Example of BrightPath in pupils work. Maths lesson, pre-assessed as orange and self-assessed as green; showing progression for the lesson.
Key takeaways
Student-centric
Involving students in the design ensured BrightPath met their needs, making learning more engaging and personalised. They loved having their voices heard and seeing our iterations take shape from their thoughts. It also felt that they were at the heart of the process throughout every stage.
Iterative Development
Continuous feedback from pilot tests refined the concept, enhancing its effectiveness and impact. The development process involved multiple stages, with the tool continuing to evolve. Viewing it as an ever-changing resource, rather than becoming attached to fixed ideas, was crucial to its success.