Innovative ways to learn Science and Maths

When we were toying with several ideas on education, we wanted to start with defining a problem statement that we would be solving. Purely from our observation as parents of school-going children, we listed the following:

a. Only a small % of students achieve superlative performance
b. Every student goes through the same cycle of learning
c. Many students move to the next class/grade without mastering the current level
d. Tests reveal score, but, not the strengths and weaknesses

Being a group of techies our approach was always to go the basics. So, not the immediate jump to multi-media lessons to solve the above. Our approach was to find a well researched teaching method and design a scalable implementation using today's technology.

We started looking at past research. And, sure enough, there were many, who had designed methods and conducted experiments in student groups to prove that they worked. Of course, we needed generous help from our Chief Advisor, Prof Pant, who sent several research papers for us to read and digest.

We narrowed down to the following teaching/learning methods:

a. Mastery Learning
b. Formative Assessment
c. Adaptive Assessment

Let me explain the above in short:
Mastery Learning starts with a premise that under appropriate learning conditions, every child can demonstrate mastery on unit exams, typically 80%. Each child has a different style of learning and each needs different duration to learn a concept.

The objective of Formative Assessment is to provide the strengths and weaknesses of a child as opposed to providing a score.

Adaptive Testing adjusts the difficulty level of the test based on the user response. So, it adjusts the level of difficulty based on the level of the user.

The first two have been successful in classrooms, but, could not have a widespread popularity because of the difficulties with implementation. Mastery learning requires the teachers to conduct several tests on the same topic before she can advance the entire class to the next topic. Similarly, formative assessment requires teachers to provide personalized feedback to the students. Both are extremely difficult for a typical class size of 30-50.

The concept of these two methods appealed to us, so, we thought of designing a solution that would use technology to overcome these difficulties. We confined our scope to only two elements of the above methods:
a. Keep providing tests to students until they have shown sufficient proficiency with the current topic.

b. Provide personalized feedback to every student

And, of course, do the above in an automated manner.

So, we came up with the following design:



Here steps 2, 3 & 5 were based on the principles of Formative Assessment. While the step 4 was based on Mastery Learning.

Today, we are at Phase I of the implementation, where we have made some simplifications. Here is our current implementation:


In the next post, I will share some details on the challenges faced in developing this solution. You can take a look at the current beta implementation at http://www.elcues.com.

Appreciate your feedback on the methodology and its implementation.

Best.

Prem