Next comes the question of interventions.

Generic interventions in the form of standard text books lose their relevance as soon as we talk of student level customization. Also, the nature of intervention whether it is instruction or instructor led practice or focussed on test taking skills, whether hard or soft becomes important for obvious reasons. The key is finding a) the right mix of types of intervention, and, b) determining what those interventions are.

Preparation deficiencies amongst the students can be clubbed in the following categories:

• Knowledge deficiency - This could include one or more of lack of understanding of concepts, lack of pre-requisite knowledge, improper understanding of interlinkages between concepts, lack of understanding of application
• Skill deficiency - This could include inadequate reading and comprehension skills, lack of analytical ability, lack of critical reasoning skills, lack of data cognition and understanding skills, lack of composition skills etc.

In an ideal scenario, we should map out all the atomic level skills and knowledge areas relevant to the test and measure the student’s score in all of them. Also, the required skill and knowledge level (corresponding to the target score) being known, the picture will be much clearer in terms of skill gap. Skill gap score for each attribute will dictate the specific type of intervention and the activities to be included in it.

Ideally, determining the intervention will not be the third step in developing such an engine, though it comes sequentially as the third step. Mapping the intervention to the skill gap will in-fact proceed soon after the required attribute map is done.

For each knowledge or skill attribute, experts will need to determine what nature of interventions and what intervention activities should be used for every level of skill gap. That’s important because a skill gap of 4 on an attribute might warrant a completely different intervention vis-a-vis a skill gap of 14 on the same attribute.

Thus, during the development phase itself, we need to have a menu of interventions corresponding to each possible skill gap score on all the attributes. What specific intervention gets chosen from those in the menu will also depend upon the behavioral map of the student.

Once such a mapping of intervention activities with the skill gap scores is known, the task is a simple selection of relevant intervention activities.

This brings us to the third most important pillar of the perfect test program viz feedback and mid-way course correction.

(Continued in part 4)