How NORC partnered with ReadSoft to support Qatar's National Education Reform

The Client: State of Qatar

The senior government leadership of Qatar, an Arab Gulf country, believes that investment in human capital is critical to its national development. Over the last several years, Qatar has embarked on an ambitious and comprehensive effort to reform its educational system in order to develop its human resources to the fullest. The goal of the ambitious Qatar Educational Project is to create a modern, progressive and world-class education system that will prepare the state and its citizens for the challenges of the 21st century.

As part of this reform effort, the Qatari government established the Supreme Education Council and its Evaluation Institute (EI) in 2002. The EI's mission is to monitor school performance and to promote informed decision making to improve the education experience and outcomes at all levels of the education system. To accomplish this mission, the EI has been charged with collecting data related to the education sector, including measuring the quality of Qatari schools and student educational outcomes. The EI makes available the data on aggregate school performance and the education environment to government agencies, decision-makers, educators and parents to empower them to make informed decisions.

The Challenge: Data Collection

To accomplish its mission, the EI needed to track the progress and impact of the education reform efforts in Qatar across school years. This, in turn, meant that the EI needed to collect a complete set of "baseline" data that measured the state of the school system, its principals, teachers, students and parents before the education reform measures began to take effect. The EI then needed to continue to track these measures, as well as new measures, over the subsequent school years.

To collect the data, the EI retained NORC in 2003 to assist in the creation of a Qatar-based survey organization. NORC was asked to assist the EI in building the local capacity necessary to perform this comprehensive data collection.

The implementation of this project posed a number of major challenges to NORC's IT team, including the following:

• The baseline round of 2003-2004 school year data collection had to begin within months of the start of the project. This was an extremely short timeframe for an overseas deployment of a complete suite of survey operations and interviewing systems.

• All interviewing and surveying had to be conducted in Arabic, a complex, script-based language that reads from right-to-left.

• Upon award of the contract, the EI did not yet have a permanent facility or a supporting IT infrastructure in place.

• The EI determined that instead of interviewing and testing a sample (i.e. scientifically designed subset) of principals, teachers, parents and students; it would instead interview and test a full census of every respondent associated with the Qatari school system. This, in turn, greatly increased the scale of the data collection.

• In early 2004, the EI needed to administer paper surveys to students and their parents, and to administer to students a full suite of standardized assessment tests. This entailed the printing, distributing, re-collecting, scanning and processing of almost 50 document templates comprising 6.5 million scanned pages of paper. Each of these pages was truly unique since each physical document contained a bar code and text that identified a specific student and school.

The Solution: ReadSoft DOCUMENTS for Forms for integrated scanning into a full lifecycle document and data management solution

Put together, these challenges, combined with many other ones, would require that NORC work both "fast" and "smart", since the project's aggressive combination of scope and schedule left very little room for error or rework.

To perform the scanning of the paper surveys and assessment tests, NORC selected ReadSoft's FORMS software. This software would work in tandem with SPSS' Dimensions interviewing software, which was already integrated with ReadSoft. (In tandem, NORC selected SPSS' Dimensions interviewing software to conduct laptop-based, computer-assisted interviews with school employees.)

To successfully deliver a full-lifecycle solution for paper surveys and assessment tests that met the needs of the EI, NORC had to implement a strategy that relied on a core set of proven best practices from both NORC's IT experience and the larger IT industry. Most notable among these best practices were the following:

• To mitigate risks related to the project's complex challenges, NORC partnered closely with ReadSoft, working with ReadSoft's professional services staff and its product development team. ReadSoft provided product-related support at all stages of the project, helping to ensure the optimal implementation of the FORMS product, while also reducing the time spent on avoidable issues.

• To facilitate a rapid implementation, NORC made extensive use of the rich set of functionality available out-of-the-box in FORMS.

• NORC integrated ReadSoft into a larger suite of information systems designed to manage the end-to-end paper and data lifecycle. This larger solution included an overall case management system, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system used to manage the production and tracking of paper, high-speed printers, high-speed scanners, and a laptop-based system that performed a number of field data collection functions including tracking paper in the schools through the use of barcode readers.

The Result

NORC and the EI successfully completed the 2003-2004 data collection. The following are some highlighted results from this effort:

• The project's information systems supported a surveying and assessment testing effort that encompassed over 300 schools and approximately 80,000 students in less than 12 weeks.

• In a matter of several months, NORC and its client created a large-scale data collection organization that interacted with over 100,000 people, deployed a complex suite of supporting systems and successfully conducted a nationwide education data collection effort.

• By collaborating closely with ReadSoft to ensure the full implementation of ReadSoft's documented best practices for a FORMS installation, the installation set a new record by doubling the traditional throughput for scanning and verification in ReadSoft FORMS.

• Since its initial implementation in the 2003-2004 school year, NORC has continued to work with ReadSoft and its client to repeat the data collection over two additional school years. Since the first year, NORC has made increasing use of ReadSoft's Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to more closely integrate FORMS into the larger data collection solution. Today, this implementation is one of the most robust single-site implementations of ReadSoft FORMS in the world, in terms of scanning capacity and the volume of scanning during peak production periods. The following table summarizes the scanning volumes for the three years of data collection.

About NORC

NORC is a professional services firm based in Chicago that provides services in the areas of IT consulting, survey research and contract research and development. NORC's staff of almost 1,500 employees works on over 100 projects each year. NORC produces annual revenue of approximately $100 million. The majority of this revenue is generated through IT-related consulting and data collection projects. Established over 60 years ago, NORC is a not-for-profit corporation affiliated with the University of Chicago.

The solutions NORC delivers reflect its deep capabilities in Data Capture, Data Management and Analysis, Collaboration and Dissemination Solutions and IT Strategy. NORC's team of over 100 IT staff offers a wide variety of IT capabilities including overall solution architecture, project management, software engineering, software package configuration, database development and administration, business analysis, user interface design, quality assurance, and infrastructure and network management.

NORC's IT Practice works with a wide variety of technologies ranging from scanning technologies to web-based solutions to mobile computing solutions. NORC works with packaged, open source and custom developed software on a variety of platforms. NORC also works with a variety of database and business intelligence technologies. For more information please visit www.norc.org.