QuEST: Revolutionizing Repository Cross-referencing to Transform Discovery of Teaching Materials

An emerging activity of digital educational repositories is the cross-referencing of resources with national and state standards. The goal of QuEST (Quality Estimate Scoring Technique) is to provide a cross-referencing support system to greatly increase the productivity of the expert human cross-referencer so vastly more resources can be matched with higher accuracy. This mechanism uses information found in NSDL's Strand Maps for both characterization and discrimination analysis to support the scoring of a resource to a particular Strand Map benchmark. QuEST is providing a working cross-referencing support system that can be plugged into any partner digital repository. It is transforming the cross-referencing task from a strictly concept matching effort to a truly representative comparison of what is important to educators. This is reducing the burden on teachers by providing a better filtered set of resources that have been selected based on quality markers used by teachers. By cross-referencing useful content more quickly and effectively, teachers are able to find and select more appropriate content which in turn is helping them deliver high quality education to their students and achieve higher personal satisfaction. This is also leading to greater utilization of the repository. QuEST also supports the NSDL mission by functioning as a learning environment for its project participants, including undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, and librarians. Through their exposure to the larger evaluation and software development components of QuEST, project participants gain increased understanding of the overall digital repository research process.