This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project studies the feasibility of creating representations of data for teachers and students that are visually compelling, easy to understand, and sharply focused on the goal of identifying and reporting in real time academic accomplishments that are highly positively correlated with meeting important educational goals. Phase I has four goals. First, historical Learning Management System (LMS) usage data are analyzed to identify teacher and student use behaviors positively correlated with high student achievement. Second, prototypes of informational dashboards are designed with the objective of motivating teachers and students to meet teaching and learning goals. Third, functional, executable specifications are designed for the data capture, extraction, and transformation processes to generate information for dashboards. Finally, user studies are conducted to verify that the dashboard design receives positive user responses. Thus, Phase I aims to identify the characteristics of information representations deemed beneficial by experts and potential users; to determine how to represent information to motivate teachers and students by focusing on accomplishments; and to identify the data warehouse requirements for storing, retrieving, and aggregating this information across schools, districts and academic years.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is significant. The visual representations of data for teachers and students developed in this project advance the positive attributes (assets) of the teaching and learning experience rather than focusing simply on right and wrong answers. With these innovative representations of instructional and performance data, students can see in clear, quantitative terms the power of their effort on their achievement. Teachers can examine their enacted curriculum versus the envisioned curriculum, and see evidence of their successes in engaging the students they work hard to educate. Administrators have an initial rubric for examining learning assets rather than deficits and for supporting work within a positive framework. The project also offers significant commercial potential for Agile Mind. New commercial products could include new or enhanced low-cost reporting tools for students, teachers, schools and districts and for-fee custom reports to schools and districts about student performance with targeted interventions to improve those outcomes.
PI: Linda Chaput Award Number: 1046033 Due: 3.31.2012 <<Describe the project outcomes or findings that address the intellectual merit and broader impacts of the work as defined in the NSF merit review criteria. This description should be a brief (generally, two to three paragraphs) summary of the project’s results that is written for the lay reader. Principal Investigators are strongly encouraged to avoid use of jargon, terms of art, or acronyms.>> This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project studied the feasibility of providing new at-a-glance progress reports based on educators’ and students’ own use of Agile Mind’s online instructional and assessment resources. The graphical representations of data were designed to be visually compelling and easy to understand, displaying real-time information about academic accomplishments that are positively correlated with meeting importanteducational goals. Phase I of this project delivered four results: (1) prototypes of graphical representations of data about teacher and student use of Agile Mind’s Internet-based mathematics and science programs; (2) a series of usability studies with teacher and administrator users of Agile Mind’s programs and services that informed prototype enhancements; (3) identification of methods for statistical analysis appropriate to the sets of data; and (4) functional, executable specifications for the data extraction and transformation required to deliver the reports in real time while maintaining the low-cost, high-quality requirements for our programs. The at-a-glance project reports – prototyped and tested with educators in Phase I – are designed to advance the positive attributes, or assets, of the teaching and learning experience rather than focusing simply on right and wrong answers. The prototyped reports inform teachers and students about progress towards learning goals and increase their motivation to focus on the learning goals by emphasizing accomplishments. With these innovative representations of instructional and achievement data, students will be able to see in clear, quantitative terms the power of their effort on their achievement. Teachers will be able to examine their enacted curriculum versus the envisioned curriculum, and to see evidence of their successes in engaging students. Administrators will have a rubric for examining learning assets rather than deficits and to support work within a positive framework. TheUnited States faces a crucial challenge: we are not successfully educating many of our population to compete for well-paying jobs in domestic and world markets. Achievement gaps—both socioeconomic and racial—represent a significant barrier to achieving broad success. Government and education leaders agree that both reducing achievement gaps and improving education are critical. To meet this challenge, there is a need for tools that enable teachers to self-evaluate and self-monitor the successful enactment of curricula in the classroom, and that can increase a teacher’s ability to make decisions that improve student achievement. The data representations prototyped in Phase I will meet this need by giving teachers and students real-time reports that depict—in clear, graphic, and quantitative terms—the effects of instruction, student opportunity, and student effort on achievement.
