Throughout my teaching career, I have struggled with providing students and parents with timely and quality feedback with regards to student progress. I cannot seem to grade homework, quizzes, and tests fast enough and in a way that allows students to experience maximum growth and learning. I am very much interested in looking at ways in which technology can help me to give students and parents the feedback that they desire in a timely manner, but without sacrificing the quality of the assignments and assessments that I currently give.
There are two ways that I believe technology may be able to help me. Or shall I say, there are two things that I’d like to be able to do with technology to solve this problem. At this point, I’m not even sure if the technology exists to help me. 1) I’d like to keep track of each student’s progress individually in a way that outlines which concepts and skills the student has mastered and which are left to be mastered. 2) Use student response systems and other computer generated assessments to give students immediate feedback. I have done some preliminary research on student response systems for CEP 810 so I know that there is a substantial amount of research available that supports the use of them in the classroom. There are, however, several different ways that they can be used and I would like to explore those ways in depth so help solve my particular dilemma.
Implementation will take place in the fall with students, but there is plenty of prep work for implementation that can begin right now. First and foremost, I would need to figure out how to catalog the skills and concepts that all students need to master. I’ll begin by just doing this for the first unit. Secondly, I’d need to explore options for keeping track of mastery of the skills for each individual student. Is there even a technology available to help with this? I was wondering if there was some website where students could answer a series of questions online and then the system would report what students do and don’t understand. I know that there are programs like Study Island for the state of Michigan, but it is only aligned to the middle school grade level expectations. There is nothing, that I know of , available for the high school content expectations. Thirdly, I could work on how to craft assessment questions for students to answer that do not evoke guessing strategies as students often resort to when given multiple choice questions. I know that student response systems can also be used without the multiple choice feature. The bottom line is I want to use technology to better access what little Johnny knows, doesn’t know, and how to give Johnny and his parents meaningful and timely feedback so that he can use it to improve.
I believe this problem of practice and its technological solution address all 4 common places in education. 1) As the teacher, I will need to learn the software used with the student response system and familiarize myself with online resources that could help with student assessment. I will also need to work on crafting questions that solicit meaningful responses from students so that I am assessing them in a legitimate way. 2) The learner will have very little to learn in the way of the technology. However, students will need to be coached as to how best to use the results and feedback to improve their understanding and mastering of skills. 3) The subject matter will need to be broken down to a set of concepts and skills for evaluation purposes. And 4) There will need to be some instructions given to students about how to use the student response systems and what their behavior is to be like when we’re using them in class. Also, when we’re in the computer lab, students will need to be monitored so that they are on-task.
I may find that I am being overly ambitious and need to scale this quest down to focus only one one element or use of student response systems. I fully expect that to be the case. However, this does demonstrate a huge problem of practice for me and explored potential technological solutions.
Hi Missy,
ReplyDeleteYou sound you have a lot to tackle with this project, but think what you are attempting to do can be done. Like you said it may be piece by piece at first but totally agree that what you want to do and getting parents involved sounds wonderful.
My first impression of what you want to be done can be done with several Web 2.0 components that with the right application could incorporate all the pieces into one application. I could easily see using blog or wiki for each student to provide feedback and would allow interaction between you and students and their parents.
There are plenty of sites that offer CMS (course management systems) that are free (yes, this is great!) that have many of the tools that you are looking for so you wouldn't have to do them separately. A one-stop operation would be ideal for you. Check out http://www.rcampus.com as a starting point to being your research.
The only thing that I didn't totally agree with was your #2 item. I understand they are high school students and are tech savvy when it comes to mobile phones, social networking, chatting, but when it comes to on-line course and internet technologies, there will be a learning curve for each of them. I recall my first on-line course which was nothing like I expected it to be so they may not have any technology in the sense of how to use a computer, they will need some assistance and coaching when it comes to the collaboration and operation of the application you are introducing to them.
Overall, sounds like a lot to research but when fully implemented for your students it sounds like it will not only save you time but also provide some wonderful feedback and learning opportunities for your students.
Wonderful project focus! Providing feedback to students in a timely manner is a huge issue for all grade levels. After reading through your post, it looks like your project has two distinct feedback threads. One thread, involves communicating student progress to parents (and their student). While the second thread focuses on using classroom assessment results and lack of student learning observed by way of low grades on homework, to drive/improve classroom instruction and student learning. A couple of areas that I suggest you take a closer look at: How do you currently use the assessment information to drive classroom instruction (and impact student learning)? What parent communication methods and strategies do you already have in place that are working for you? And which ones aren't working as well as you would like them to? And finally, why is this a problem? Are students having a difficult time mastering content? Meeting AYP? It would be a good idea to narrow the focus down to just one thread, for the time being. You can always tackle the second one at a later on.
ReplyDeleteEven though the technology was to be mentioned in the final Project Description post - it bears mentioning that the CPS system exports assessment data into Excel for analysis. Plus, standards can be attached to any assessment question, when the question is first generated. That would be one way to track curriculum mastery, have instant data for parents, plus give you a sense as to what content needs to be reviewed - or not.
I agree with Joe on #2 - If you elect to go the CMS or CPS route, students will need to have explicit instruction on how to use the resources. My students like to "race" to see who can answer first on their response pads - they aren't even thinking about the question or the answer choices=8-}
Great! However there are always both pros and cons on everything.
ReplyDeleteI strongly believe that technology would have a significant role in education. For example, old teachers who cannot use computers well are having a hard time learning technology. Children of today are can do better than teacher.. - something like this, how to manage "tech" may be another issue.
Very good description of the problem and very practical goal. I sure there is a technical solution for your problem. I agree that being able to get the immediate feedback would give you time back. The next logical step would be giving parents access to their child's profile so they can check their child's status anytime. I think this is a great use of technology.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a grat use of technology. Getting the immediate feedback will help give you some time back. The next step would be to give parents access to their child's profile, so they can check the status any time. I think that this is the practical goal that technology can help with.
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