In June I was talking with the headmaster of a school which does
education research. There are two things from that discussion that seems
relevant for this question:
1. Karma could measure the time it takes to finish a task in a compound
exercise. If it is statistically relevant then it could give some hint
to the teacher which parts of the curriculum are hard for the given
child. If I will be able to persuade the headmaster then there will be
research (hard data) which hopefully will find out whether this
measurement is meaningful or pointless.
2. There is a VERY HARD to develop exercise model where the child can
follow multiple paths to the solution. In this case the possible choices
the child can follow makes a graph with most of the leaves ending with
"does not compute". If this exercise model proves to be useful (which
will be determined in the mentioned research) then Karma should store
the way the child solved the exercise and not only the end result. So
what I wanted to say is that it is possible that the wrong steps can
give more informations to the teacher about the knowledge of the child
than the fact whether the child was able to solve the exercise or not.
Because the 2. point can be a little bit hard to understand, here is an
example:
The problem is this: "If we used A amount of paint to fully paint a
little picture with sides B and C, how much paint do we need to fully
paint a room with sides D, E and height F?"
This is an exercise with 3 steps. The child has to calculate the area of
the picture (P=BxC) and the walls' (W=(D+E)*F*2) and has to calculate A/P*W.
Now the graph looks something like this: from the beginning the child
can calculate either area or can do something like B*E which "does not
compute". If he has P and W then he can do either A/P or W/P then either
A/P*W or W/P*A respectively. In every step the program should
graphically show what the child just have calculated (what can be
impossible if he uses D*E*F*B for example).
Now I do not insist that you develop this 2. point since it is a HUGE
task (and needs some research to know whether it really help children
understand complex relationships) but moving Karma into this direction
(just a little bit) would help a lot if the headmaster would decide to
do this research. In this case we will translate the resulting exercises
to English, probably you will be interested in that.
ps:
I intend to use Karma for interactive curriculum development for reasons
Bryan Berry talked about a lot.
ps2:
By research I mean "try out with kids while somebody from the University
measures the outcome".
Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
As previously mentioned by Bryan in his "Automated Assessment is the
Killer App" blog post
(http://karmaproject.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/assessment-is-the-killer-app/)
student assessment is an important component of Karma.
While toying around with the lesson UI I realized that the assessment
area is still very much an empty space (which kinda reminds me of the
group view in Sugar;-) as we haven't really discussed how it should
look, what kind of data will be kept (which is of course heavily
dependent on the type of lesson), how the data will be stored, etc. To
keep the efforts required to do that in check I think that it might
make sense to start by offering a handful of templates - both on the
UI and storage backend side of things - to fit the most common
use-cases in terms of different lesson types (e.g.inserted words into
sentences, doing calculations, etc.)
Now I was wondering whether anyone here had specific suggestions on
how to address this or pointers to how other e-learning solutions
(regardless of whether stand-alone applications or Web based) solve
this interesting challenge.
Thanks in advance,
Christoph
--
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, olpcnews
url: www.olpcnews.com <http://www.olpcnews.com>
e-mail: christ...@olpcnews.com <mailto:christ...@olpcnews.com>
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