Assignment: Midterm Project 1: Group project proposal

Collaborators:

 1. Background

Assessment of student knowledge or understanding is a hotly debated topic in education. Few would argue it’s necessity, but many disagree on methods. From standardized tests and multiple-choice Scantron exams, to oral presentations, student assessment can take many forms. 

Integral to good teaching practice is the ability of a teacher to assess any student’s understanding of a given concept. Meaningful assessments take careful, diligent, and sometimes backwards planning (first creating goals and benchmarks, then creating assessments to measure student progress, and finally creating lessons to bring students to each level of understanding). This planning is time-intensive.

Communicating student knowledge is often tricky. Some students find it difficult to fit their understanding of a given concept in a teacher’s framework. In addition, many students do not advocate for their own understanding. Many feel fear or anxiety in asking for clarification or saying they just aren’t following the teacher’s lesson.

Studies show that students who track their understanding of a concept or lesson perform better. Part of successful student engagement is fostering an awareness of a student’s level of understanding or lack of understanding about a lesson.  

2. Motivation

a. Teachers should be able to judge, at any given moment, the effectiveness of their lesson. 

b. Students should be able to give meaningful feedback to a teacher that will aid in the delivery of a lesson.

c. This feedback should be available to both students and teachers during the delivery of a lesson in order to improve teaching effectiveness. 

3. Problem

a. Designing checks for understanding is necessary but time-consuming. 

b. Students sometimes fear giving critical feedback that might call attention to themselves or betray their own difficulty with a lesson. 

c. Often students do not see their progress in a class or over a certain lesson.

4. Design

Ambient displays of student feedback will help teachers assess their own lessons during the delivery and allow students to give real-time, anonymous feedback to a teacher.

Necessary devices

a. Input device

Purpose: to input a student’s judgment of how well they are understanding a lesson at a given point. Design: Students turn a dial on a small device that describes the various levels of understanding “none”, “very little”, “somewhat”, “good”, “excellent”. Communication: input device sends this data and a unique id number to a collection device.

b. Collection device

Purpose: to input the classroom data, store and track data alongside previous inputs, aggregate data into a classroom average, send aggregate to output device. While student data is anonymous to the classroom, each student could be uniquely identifiable by device.

c. Output device:

Purpose: to display aggregate in a meaningful, non-disruptive way. Design: a board, light, or series of lights that change color according to aggregate data (e.g. red means classroom understanding is below 60%, yellow below 80%, and green between 80-100%).

5. Future Work

While displaying student understanding may be helpful for real-time instruction, tracking this data over weeks and months will help a teacher improve his or her own instruction. Software should be developed that tracks classroom averages as well as individual data. A teacher could then look to find which students need extra help with a particular lesson and hold an individualized or differentiated session.