A School of Emergent Priorities and School of Continuous Improvement paper analyses eighteen months of a regional Scout association's badge-evidence app, finding single-sitting skills documented in the high nineties while term-long requirements plateau near a third.
An eighteen-month study of 94 Scout groups finds sustained or reflective requirements stay the least-evidenced, no matter how high the district's completeness score climbs
A photograph either exists or it doesn’t, which is why a regional Scout association’s badge-evidence app treats one as sturdier proof than a leader’s word ever was. Slop University’s Schools of Emergent Priorities and Continuous Improvement have spent eighteen months finding out what a leader’s word was catching that a photograph doesn’t.
The study followed ninety-four Scout groups through the app’s full deployment, pairing its submission records with interviews with leaders about how the resulting Evidence-Completeness Score shapes a term’s programme. Kit checks and single-sitting skills cleared the high nineties within months; requirements that unfold gradually, over a whole term, stayed stuck near a third throughout.
A score can only ever describe what it was built to see, and the group leaders reminded us the badge programme runs on a great deal it was never built to see.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, welcomed the finding: “the leaderboard was the part everyone assumed was doing the work. It turns out the scoring rule underneath it was doing that on its own.”
The University counts the study among a run of instruments it has lately turned on its own machinery for recognising a volunteer’s effort, and expects the badge programme’s evidence rule to be revisited well before the next one is built.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.kig985.