Assessment Made Easy, Fun & Meaningful!
What factors are critical when we look at successful movements led by youth people?
This was one of the core questions that motivated us to revisit our Impact framework earlier this year. Subsequently, this also became one of the driving questions for a research project on Shift to study its long-term potential and impact. The findings revealed both enabling factors such as motivation, group diversity, partnerships, networks, financial base, etc., and challenges around rigid structures, power inequalities and inadequate institutional capacities to incorporate young voices. Combined with practical insights gathered over the past 5 years operating in over 20 countries, we now have a revised impact framework and tool: meet our Evolution Tracker.
We all agree on the importance and need for assessments. However, not all of us agree on how assessment should be done. Most current approaches to evaluation employ an extractive logic where young people are seen as subjects to whom assessments are administered. For young people taking the assessment, it often resembles the tests and exams, along with the accompanying boredom and anxiety.
Instead, assessments should be yet another empowering tool in a young changemaker's growing resource arsenal, providing them with useful, relevant and meaningful data to make good decisions.
The Evolution Tracker moves away from this approach and instead merges innovation from the EdTech and gamification space to create a fun and interactive experience. By playing the Evolution Tracker, young activists respond to prompts that spark reflection about their own journey, whilst subtly educating them on indispensable factors that matter deeply for nurturing successful movements.
This approach provides Shifters with insights and data they need to effectively improve their strategy, group governance and sustainability in a language and medium most conducive to them; it also better allows them to track their progress as they move towards their long term goals.
For the Fun Adults facilitating this game, the ease of implementation has been drastically lightened since the otherwise arduous task of data collection and analysis is now automated through the game app. With this also comes greater transparency and instant access to the data gathered between all partners, equally.
Since young people are at the center of everything that Shift does, the assessment process loops around and ends with them. After analysing the data, we get back to the young people with their Evolution Scorecard, a graphic-heavy, youth and child-friendly card guiding young people about their progress on their journey to become influential change agents.
Over several years, this makes it easy to track longer-term change (even without Shift in the picture) since young people would simply have to play the game once every year, without additional resources or intensive training. For the fun adult, having this periodic data set also enables them to have their finger on the pulse of youth and child-led movements within their localities; it would also help better inform their programmatic priorities, particularly on capacity building and progressive scaling up.
Evolution Tracker in Action
Piloted on
3rd August 2024
Total time taken
~30 minutes
Shift groups:
3
Educate their fellow children and youth about sexual and reproductive health & rights
Legal advocacy on procedural rights and duties of children who come in contact/conflict with the law
The 3 Shift groups were gathering for a multi-media workshop. I requested the fun adult for a 30-minute slot to try the tool, which she kindly agreed to.
After a brief introduction and instruction, 17 statements were projected onto the screen sequentially that prompted responses across the 9 categories and 17 indicators of successful child and youth-led movements. The Shifters turned their papers to indicate their response; once everyone was ready, their responses were scanned using an app. This automatically logged all responses, as the camera scanned from one side of the room to the other capturing all the paper responses.
Following this exercise, their responses were then exported into a database that calculates their average scores per group and generates a categorisation of where they are on their evolutionary journey to become Influential change agents. Finally, we put this insight into a child-friendly Evolution Scorecard which is given back to the Shifters. See the attached Scorecard for a sample.
