Classroom Learning Partner
promoting meaningful instructor-student interactions in large classes

Dates

June 2005 — December 2006

Principal Investigators

Dr. Kimberle Koile (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory)
Dr. Howard Shrobe (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory)

Problem

Personal interaction between instructor and student in large classes is almost impossible. How do we increase that interaction, so that classes become more a two-way conversation between instructor and students? One way is to give students the ability to engage in hands-on activities that yield immediate feedback through interaction with instructors and peers. This technique, termed "in-class assessment", has proven successful in large and small classes. In large classrooms that employ a wireless polling system called Personal Response System (PRS), for example, students use a transmitter to submit answers to multiple-choice, true and false, or matching questions. The results are tabulated and displayed in the form of a histogram on the instructor’s computer. A system such as PRS provides a way for students to communicate their misunderstandings to an instructor. Instructors, however, are limited to asking questions having pre-existing sets of possible answers, i.e., close-ended questions, which assess recognition rather than recall.

In small classes, instructors can engage the students in a wider variety of in-class exercises than in large classes, since an instructor only has to evaluate a small number of answers. Students can work problems at a blackboard, on paper, or using TabletPC-based systems. Can this technique be used in a large classroom, e.g., with 100 or more students, where the logistics of managing that many student answers could easily overwhelm an instructor?

Goal

To develop innovative technology to improve student experience and learning in large classes.

Overview

The Classroom Learning Partner (CLP) is being built to support in-class exercises in a large class, while also enabling instructors to use the wide variety of exercises possible in small classes. The key idea:   aggregate student solutions into a small number of equivalence classes and present the summary information to the instructor, e.g., in the form of a histogram.

CLP uses as its framework an existing TabletPC-based presentation system, Classroom Presenter, which supports student wireless submission of digital ink answers to in-class exercises. Using the Classroom Presenter system, an instructor lectures and annotates slides with digital ink. The slides and ink are displayed simultaneously on a large screen and on students’ Tablet PCs. When an instructor displays a slide containing an exercise, the students work the exercise using digital ink on their tablets, then anonymously submit their answers to the instructor via a wireless network. Using Classroom Presenter in this way works well in classes of size eight or smaller, as instructors are easily overwhelmed by more than eight solutions. We are extending Classroom Presenter so that in-class exercises can be used as a teaching method in large classes. We have a prototype CLP system that aggregates student answers (numbers, strings, and sets of numbers and strings) into a small number of equivalence classes by comparing those answers to instructor-specified right answers and wrong answers, and/or by clustering student answers. The software presents the results to the instructor (and students), e.g. in the form of a histogram and representative answers.

More Project Details from the Principal Investigators

We are in the beginning stages of the Classroom Learning Partner project. We have collected examples of in-class exercises and student answers for MIT's introductory undergraduate computer science class (6.001) run without technology, and used that data to create exercise and answer ontologies. We anticipate aggregating answers in the form of text (i.e., filling in decodings for bit strings), text and markings (i.e., labeling boxes in a flow diagram), and sketches (i.e., drawing a search tree). We have organized the system architecture into three components and begun work on each:   (1) An instructor authoring tool, with which an instructor will prepare lecture slides that include exercises annotated with answer type, correct answers, and incorrect answers if known; (2) a digital ink to structured object translator, which will take students' submitted answers in the form of digital ink and translate each into an object of the specified answer type (thereby providing semantics for the ink); and (3) an aggregator, which will group student answers into equivalence classes, summarize the results, and present a histogram and representative answers to the instructor, who can then display the results to the class. In a later version, we imagine adding a component that sends individual replies to students based on comparing their answers to right and wrong answers, offering explanations of misunderstood concepts that are related to particular wrong answers (i.e., a la intelligent tutoring systems).

We plan to deploy a prototype in 6.001 recitations (class size of approximately 30) during academic year 2005-2006, and a second version in 6.001 lecture (with a typical class size of 350) the following year. We also will disseminate our system to the Classroom Presenter community and make it available to others via the Web.

Project Output

Publications

"Development of a Tablet-PC-based System to Increase Instructor-Student Classroom Interactions and Student Learning" Kimberle Koile and David Singer, presented at WIPTE: Workshop on the Impact of Pen-based Technology on Education, April 6-7, 2006, Purdue University. To appear in The Impact of Pen-based Technology on Education: Vignettes, Evaluation, and Future Directions, edited by D. Berque, J. Prey, and R. Reed; Purdue University Press. View paper

"Improving Learning in CS1 with Tablet-PC-based In-Class Assessment", Kimberle Koile and David Singer, submitted to ICER 6006 (Second International Computing Education Research Workshop), September 9-10, 2006, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK. View paper

Presentations

EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Annual Meeting, invited talk and demonstration, January 29-31, 2006, San Diego. View presentation

Links