The project goal is to develop Smart Graphs, document their effectiveness through rigorous research, and scale the implementation so this technology becomes widely available. The project studies the educational value of "Smart Graphs", digital objects that "know" about themselves and that provide scaffolding to students to help them learn about graphs and the concepts conveyed in graphs. As planned, digital Smart Graphs can be authored or customized by teachers and accept inputs from students? responses, sketches, functions, models, and probes. The software analyzes the graphs for the kinds of features that experts recognize and then engages students in conversations that instruct and assess.
The development of Smart Graphs is based on extensive prior research about students' use and understanding of graphs (TEEMSS II Project). The project is guided by a collaboration between the Concord Consortium and the Pennsylvania State Department of Education. Pennsylvania's Classrooms for the Future program, through which 40,000 laptop computers are deployed to serve 500,000 students. An outstanding panel of researchers and educators serve as project advisors.
After early development and optimization working with one high school, the technology is fully tested in 24 schools in conjunction with units on force and motion. Comparison studies (random assignment with implementation delays) provide the sources of data. The final years are devoted to scaling, reaching 200 teachers in addition to publishers who will be offered support and open source materials.
The SmartGraphs project (http://smartgraphs.org) developed two pieces of software, each of which runs directly in a Web browser, plus dozens of free online student activities for learning mathematics and science, and lesson plans for teachers. The project also created two apps for tablet computers, available for both iPad and Android tablets. One of the software applications developed for the project is a cost-free, form-based authoring system that allows anyone to create and share multi-page SmartGraphs activities for students. The other piece of software, called the runtime, delivers completed activities to students. Students use an online SmartGraphs activity by clicking on a link (URL) for the activity; there is no need to install anything on the user’s computer. Intellectual Merit Graphs are central to learning science, mathematics, and technology at almost any level of education. Yet in spite of the central role of graphs, a large body of research shows that many students have difficulties using and interpreting graphs. The SmartGraphs software and online activities we developed are designed to help students understand the context and the meaning of a wide variety of graphs. For example, in Physical Science classes students using one of the activities might be asked to click the portion of a graph that shows when an object stopped moving, or when it was accelerating most rapidly, or what its velocity was at a particular time. The SmartGraphs software provides visual and text hints and scaffolds to help learners understand the specific graphs used in an activity. The design of SmartGraphs software, and the activities, was based on reviewing prior research studies about students’ use and understanding of graphs. In addition, randomized experimental research that we conducted in nearly 80 classrooms demonstrated that using SmartGraphs activities helped students in Physical Science classes to better understand graphs, compared to students studying the same subject from the same textbook who did not use SmartGraphs. A paper about the research for this project was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal (Zucker, Kay, & Staudt. 2014. Helping Students Make Sense of Graphs: An Experimental Trial of SmartGraphs Software. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 23:441-457). Broader Impacts This project created materials useful for a wide range of audiences, including Algebra teachers and students, Physical Science teachers and students, and others. The HTML5 software we developed for SmartGraphs is available as open source computer code, so anyone or any organization is free to use the code. The dozens of online activities created by the project were released under a Creative Commons license, and can be freely used by anyone with a modern Web browser and an Internet connection. These activities can be adopted, or adapted (using the authoring system to make revisions), at no cost to users. In addition to desktop and laptop computers, schools have purchased millions of tablet computers for students. As a result, we created "apps" for both iPad and Android tablet computers that, once installed, allow users to run selected SmartGraphs activities without an Internet connection. These apps are available via iTunes (for iPad) or Google Play (for Android). The SmartGraphs:African Lions app helps students use exponential growth models and discover trends in the growth and decline of a population of lions in Tanzania. The SmartGraphs:Algebra app provides students with 19 graph-related activities on four key topics: linear equations, quadratic equations, transformations of functions and exponential functions. Web sites that "bundle" free online activities from different providers have incorporated SmartGraphs activities, thereby making them more widely known. One example is PowerMyLearning.
