The Improving STEM Learning Through Interactive RoboBooks is a collaborative project between Tufts University?s Center for Engineering Educational Outreach and the Center for Applied Special Technology, Inc. This project will develop RoboBooks, a novel interactive cyberenabled workspace for high school students with learning disabilities and/or behavioral/emotional disabilities that will improve their science understanding in chemistry and physics.
Phase 1 will focus on preparing the RoboBook technology for the proposed research by embedding supports and scaffolds into the tool with the goal of improving the science learning experience for students with disabilities. Expertise and assets created in an NSF-funded collaborative research project (DRL-0730260) in which CAST, EDC and the University of Michigan are developing UDL approaches to science curricula for middle and high school students will be leveraged for this project. They are 1) developing an open source UDL Inquiry Science System that enables science curricula to be transformed into digitally supported versions that incorporate UDL features, 2) creating guidelines for designing UDL science materials, and 3) developing four UDL exemplars of chemistry and biology units from tested instructional materials and evaluating the benefits of these exemplars for middle and high school students with and without learning disabilities.
In addition to preparing the technologies with embedded supports and scaffolds, the development of precise curricular units in physics and chemistry will take place during this phase of the project. A small cohort of teachers from Fenway High School and Boston Arts Academy will be incorporated into the project to advice in the design of the specific supports as well as the curricular materials. These teachers, along with one additional teacher, will be trained in the summer of 2010 to implement RoboBooks in their science classrooms in Fall 2010. Two teachers from each participating school will work with the team in Phase 2.
Phase 2 of the project focuses on collecting pilot data on the overall effectiveness of RoboBooks as designed for students with high incidence disabilities. This phase will involve two teachers each from Fenway High School and Boston Arts Academy. A pilot study will be conducted with four classrooms to measure impact of the books as well as learning (content and process) gains and engagement in science. The primary research questions driving the pilot study will be:
1. How do students with high incidence disabilities use interactive RoboBooks in high school physics and chemistry classes?
2. Which supports and scaffolds embedded in RoboBooks do students and teachers find useful?
3. How does the use of the RoboBooks affect student engagement relative to content using more traditional resources?
4. What are the student-level attitudinal benefits reasonably ascribable to using RoboBooks?
5. What cognitive benefits can be ascribed to the use of the RoboBooks? How do different implementations affect learning outcomes? What contextual variables facilitate or impede student-level learning benefits?
The pilot study will employ the following measures: student and Teacher questionnaires embedded in RoboBooks to obtain feedback on usability and content presentation; interviews with teachers and students facilitated by the project staff and the external evaluator to gather more qualitative feedback; and pre/post science assessments. In addition, classroom observations will be conducted to observe the practices of use students with disabilities engage in with RoboBooks. Davis Square Research Associates will conduct the formative and summative independent evaluation.
In a two-year project (2009-2011), researchers at Tufts University Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) and CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) collaborated to create and pilot a novel interactive electronic workbook (RoboBooks) with added supports based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). These supports are designed to provide high school students with disabilities opportunities to use proven educational technologies to design science experiments, collect and analyze data, use those data in robotic activities, and share their findings and understanding through alternative presentation media such as stop-action movies. For this pilot development project, RoboBooks was used in two inclusive high school classrooms, one in chemistry and one in physics, and data analysis focused on the students with high incidence disabilities. A one-week unit was developed in each subject for the pilot testing. UDL embedded supports included text-to-speech, options in the ways students could respond to questions, hints and highlighting of important information, concept maps that organized information and made connections, and additional images and videos for clarification. Students with high incidence disabilities varied in their ratings of the usefulness of the different UDL supports, with text-to-speech and response options rated highest. They reported that they enjoyed working on science activities in this digital format and indicated that they felt they understood the information better than when science was presented in a traditional format. Teachers also reported a higher level of engagement during the pilot implementation than they typically saw in many of their students. Due to the brief duration, it is not possible to attribute any cognitive benefits to the use of RoboBooks with embedded UDL supports.
