Introduction to blueprinting

risr/ assess offers a sophisticated and highly configurable blueprinting engine. This allows site administrators to create and manage the metadata by which the rest of the site can be organised and administered. Essentially, most other parts of the system are in some way dependent on what is set up in the site blueprint and so an effective blueprint structure is paramount to ensuring good site organisation and operation. We strongly recommend dedicating time to getting this right during the implementation process, and your product specialist will work closely with you to achieve this. 

There are many possible uses for blueprinting information, including:

• Item, content and user tagging and organisation: For example, items may need to be categorised by skill or clinical discipline for easy organisation and retrieval. Perhaps candidates will be tagged by year group, or examiners by clinical specialty.
• Automated test construction and item selection: Using those tags to subsequently select items for inclusion in exams so that curriculum coverage is appropriate and test materials are aligned to learning outcomes. 
• Controlling site permissions and user access: Perhaps you would like to achieve a situation where year group leads are only able to see and access those items relevant to their year group, or clinical question-writing groups are only able to review items from within their own discipline.
• Creating dimensional passing criteria: Where applicable you can create additional criteria to be used during result processing. Perhaps candidates need to meet the overall exam passing score but additionally need to meet a minimum score in the communication skills domain across all stations.
• Data aggregation, reporting and dimensional feedback to candidates: The blueprint provides the ability to provide feedback to candidates (and cohort comparison) based around the tags you have created. For example, the candidate scored n% in the history taking domain across all stations in the exam.
• Adding custom fields to record information against items, content or users: Perhaps you would like to record simulated patient demographic information or record an examiner's phone number against their system record. This can all be achieved by blueprinting.

Having an idea, therefore, of how you intend your data structures to work and what you want to be able to achieve operationally is a really important step in starting to design the site blueprint. 

Master vs Exam blueprint

The blueprinting functionality in risr/ assess is split across two distinct areas; the master blueprint and the exam blueprint, and each is dealt with separately in the articles that follow.

The master blueprint is the area of the system in which the site metadata/taxonomies are built and managed using data dimensions and maps.

The exam blueprint allows users to leverage those data structures to create exam templates and ensure that materials are appropriately aligned with curriculum design and learning and assessment outcomes.