Diplomas Count - June 5, 2014 - 22

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EDUCATION WEEK JUNE 5, 2014
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MEASURING MOTIVATION
Educators and researchers are experimenting with a variety of methods for
gauging students' social and emotional skills, such as perseverance and
persistence, from time-tested surveys to state-of-the-art video games.
Student Surveys:
Familiar Tools,
Mixed Success
Students are
photographed as
they play an iPad
game. Computers
reliably gauged
their emotions
from the photos.
Computers 'Read'
Body Language
By Holly Yettick
Even for a teacher with eyes in the back of her head, it is
not always possible to see who is on task and who is staring
out the window at the sky.
So in recent years, researchers have been experimenting
with cameras and computers to identify facial expressions
and body language associated with lower and higher levels
of student engagement.
For instance, in an article published in April in the peerreviewed
journal IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing,
researchers had humans observe video clips of college
students learning to play mentally challenging games
on an iPad. The researchers then "taught" computers to
use the clips to make judgments about students' levels
of engagement. The computer classifications were just as
reliable as those of human observers. Students also took
tests before and after the computer games on the skills the
games were intended to teach. And researchers found that
the video-based engagement scores predicted the post-test
scores better than the pretest scores could. The work is a
project of the National Science Foundation-funded Temporal
Dynamics of Learning Center at the University of
California, San Diego.
In actual K-12 settings, camera-based engagement
measures are still rare to nonexistent. But UC-San Diego
research professor Javier Movellan, who helped conduct
the iPad study, believes the technology is ready for prime
time in schools. His evidence is a focus group conducted by
Interscope Research and the for-profit company Emotient,
which Mr. Movellan co-founded to develop and distribute
software that recognizes human expressions.
The focus-group setting was physically similar to that
of many classrooms in that 35 people sat in rows facing
the front of the room, rather than in front of a computer.
Yet researchers successfully used cameras and software to
classify the facial expressions of 35 Denver Broncos and
Seattle Seahawks fans as they watched the 2014 Super
Bowl and the advertisements that ran during the game.
Based on the facial images, the software rated the emotional
impact of each commercial and the growing frustration
of the Denver fans as their team fell behind.
Mr. Movellan suggested the expression-recognition
software could have multiple potential uses in the K-12
field-for teachers, educational researchers, and computerized
instruction.
Of course, anytime cameras appear in classrooms, privacy
issues emerge. At this point, Mr. Movellan said, the
technology cannot tell one person from another. But he
said privacy was "a very important concern" and one that
"students and teachers and educators eventually need to
figure out how to deal with." I
By Holly Yettick
Schools have been using student
surveys for decades. But in recent
years, increasing interest in student
engagement has led to increasing
interest in this classic method of assessing
belonging, enjoyment, attachment,
investment, perseverance, and
other assets.
In 2011, the Regional Educational
Laboratory Southeast at Florida
State University in Tallahassee
produced a report listing 21 different
survey instruments designed to
measure the engagement of upperelementary
and secondary school
students.
This is not to say that all of the measures
are widely used or useful.
"Most districts have run surveys and
haven't found them very useful," said
Aaron Feuer, the CEO of Panorama Education,
a Boston-based data-analytics
startup that raised $4 million in seed
money last year from Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg's Startup:Education
and other investors.
Surveys don't necessarily measure
what they purport to assess. For example,
student course evaluations, a
standard and much-criticized fixture
of higher education, might be used to
assess teaching though they really
measure whether students like the instructor,
Mr. Feuer suggested.
"Great teaching is not a popularity
contest," he said.
An additional obstacle is that districts
often receive results in the form
of one enormous data table that is
difficult to interpret. As a result, the
reports get thrown into a drawer and
forgotten.
Panorama addresses that challenge
by providing users with individualized,
online reports that permit them
to break down the results in a variety
of ways. For example, the Colorado
Student Perception Survey that Panorama
developed with the Colorado
Education Initiative, a Denver-based
nonprofit that collaborates with that
state's education department and
districts, permits a teacher to break
down results by class period, survey
question, student subgroup, and other
categories.
The company has developed and distributed
surveys in more than 5,000
schools. Clients have included the Los
Angeles school district, the Connecticut
state education department, and Aspire,
which manages 37 publicly funded,
independently operated charter schools.
Other Efforts
The Cambridge, Mass.-based Tripod
Project for School Improvement, now
more than a decade old, developed
another survey that is widely used
to measure student engagement and
evaluate teachers. The survey was administered
to more than 1 million students
last year.
As part of a three-part series on
student surveys presented by the
Washington-based nonprofit American
Youth Policy Forum in 2013 and 2014,
Pittsburgh Science and Technology
Academy teacher Paul Ronevich said
that Tripod helped him improve his
instruction by providing specific feedback
and permitting him to compare
himself with others.
Although surveys may be widely
Video Games Provide Cover for 'Stealth Assessments'
By Benjamin Herold
When it comes to measuring social
and emotional skills such as persistence,
traditional assessments are
often "too simplified, abstract, and decontextualized,"
according to Valerie J.
Shute, a professor in the educational
psychology and learning systems department
at Florida State University
in Tallahassee.
That's why Ms. Shute promotes
the idea of "stealth assessments"
that are unobtrusively woven into
the fabric of video games in order
to measure in real time how players
are progressing toward a variety of
targets-not just for content learning,
but also for checking progress
on so-called 21st century skills.
"There's no better system than
games to provide challenging problems
without completely overwhelming
people," Ms. Shute wrote in an email.
"Stealth assessment considers [the]
process of failing and trying again as a
source of evidence for persistence."
Here's how the process is intended
to work: First, a game will track in
real time how long a player spends
on a difficult problem or how often a
player is willing to retry a problem at
which he or she has previously failed.
Based on that information, the game
can then offer encouragement or adjust
the types of problems presented to
that player, seeking to find the sweet
spot that will be challenging enough to
promote learning but not so difficult as
to discourage continued effort.
The result, Ms. Shute and others believe,
will be digital games that can not
only measure qualities like persistence,
or grit, but actually nurture them.
The first round of such games have
already been developed, including Newton's
Playground, a digital game created
by Ms. Shute with support from
the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation.
Newton's Playground aims to improve
high school students' conceptual
understanding of everyday physics-
and to help bolster their conscientiousness,
a long set of factors that includes
persistence and creativity. A recent research
study published by Ms. Shute
found solid evidence in support of the
first goal. Her team also found evidence
that the measures of persistence
LEVEL 1
LEVEL 3
The Newton's Playground game measures students' persistence as it hones their understanding of physics.
Copyright 2014 IEEE All Rights Reserved
Submitted by Valerie Shute/Florida State University

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