Handheld
Science
Copyright ©Tatar 2006
In recent years, K-12 science teachers have moved towards the use of hands-on experiences in teaching to help students better understand what is they are learning and, sometimes, to enable them to engage in discovery. But hands-on experience also can also create problems in the classroom if the teacher and student do not communicate well-enough for the point of the experience to be clear.
One project that addresses this problem is the WHIRL project. We have been co-designing technologies to help with formative assessment during hands-on science activities. Formative assessment is assessment that changes the course of instruction. It can happen when teachers or students receive information that help them understand how well the student is progressing.
This project put together coordinated activities (described below) on a one-off basis. We are currently exploring architectures for classroom coordination and connectivity more systematically in the Handheld Architecture (Tuples) projects. Also, you may be interested in my publications on this topic.
Working with teachers in Beaufort, South Carolina, three handheld tools have been developed:
Data Doers: In hands-on laboratory work in big classes, students proceed without much teacher input. They gather data, go home and write up reports. In the reports, they do their best to make sense of the record they have of their findings. Sometimes the data they bring home is complete nonsense. Sometimes they have written down measurements with the wrong label or wrong units. But the teacher cannot detect this until, at best, long after the lab, and students do not receive feedback until the next week when the lab report is returned. By then the original experience has been forgotten.
Data Doers allows teachers to create a template for data collection. Each element in the template can have associated outer bounds of reasonableness. If the students enter data that is note reasonable, the software will display a message asking them whether they are quite sure. The students then have to try to figure out whether there is a problem or not, and whether they can solve it themselves or require the teacher's help. This is a relatively simple interface to use and to author.
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Log on to Data Doers |
Choose the lab you are doing |
The teacher can use the authoring screen to decide on appropriate values are. Outside those values, a warning is signalled. |
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The students enter values for data. |
The warning is signalled. Note that the elementary school teachers were very attached to this message "data out of range," because all the words are short. The computer scientists wanted a more informative message! |
Students can ignore the warning or recheck and re-enter. Teachers give them different instructions about how to handle warnings. Some say "Check with me." Others say "Figure it out yourself." Note that a warning does not mean that anything is wrong, just that it might be wrong. |
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When done, students can beam their findings to one another. |
There are different ways to combine data, because some data are directly comparable while others are not. |
The person logged in as "teacher" has more options. |
Sketchy (with Hi-CE): In middle school, teachers are often trying to teach processes, especially cyclical processes, such as the Life-Cycle or the Rain Cycle. Sketchy allows students to draw, label and animate elements of the system they are studying. The teachers can examine what the students include, what they leave out and what stages in the cyclical processees they call out as separate.
Boomerang: Science teachers are very fond of asking questions, but this tool turns it around. It supports students asking questions and subsequent class discussion of those questions. What makes a deeper question and what makes a shallower one? What kinds of questions provoke new thoughts?
A small adoption study was conducted within the district.
Three papers report this work:
Penuel, B., Tatar, D. , and Roschelle, J. (2004) The Role of Research on Contexts of Teaching Practice in Informing the Design of Handheld Learning Technologies. Journal of Educational Computing Research . 30(4), 353-370.
Roschelle, J., Tatar, D. , Penuel, W. R., Yarnall, L., & Shechtman, N. (2004). Handheld tools that "informate" assessment of student learning in science: A requirements analysis. Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning , 21(3), 190-203. Reprinted from Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Education, JungLi, Taiwan. Voted Best-Paper.
DiGiano, C., Patton, C., Roschelle, J., Tatar, D., Yarnall, L., Manley, M. (2003) Collaboration Design Patterns: Conceptual Tools for Planning for The Wireless Classroom. Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning , 19(3), 284-297.
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