Teacher Noticing and Response to Students' Computational and Engineering Design Strategies (Poster 9)

• In Event: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of STEM Instruction: Designing New Models to Automate Feedback to Teachers

Abstract

The Responsive Instruction for STEM Education (RISE) teacher dashboard supports classroom teachers in engaging and responding to students’ developing scientific ideas and problem-solving strategies as they work in open-ended computational modeling and engineering design tasks as part of an NGSS-aligned earth sciences curriculum. Such curricula present unique challenges for teachers. They have to pay particular attention to helping students understand and integrate concepts and practices across three domains: science, engineering, and computation (Bocconi et al., 2016; Cunningham & Carlsen, 2014), while also paying attention to how students are developing their understanding (and misunderstanding) of these concepts and practices, and adopting a variety of strategies toward their learning and problem solving tasks (Bywater et al., 2021).
RISE is designed to work with computer-based open-ended learning environments. Such environments have made it possible to collect detailed traces of students’ task-oriented interactions in the learning environment, and then apply learning analytics and data mining techniques to infer students’ learning behaviors and link them to their learning outcomes (Schmeck, 2013; Azevedo et al., 2013; Kinnebrew et al., 2017; Segedy et al., 2015b). Such analyses help to identify productive and unproductive strategies students use during computational modeling in science (Zhang et al., n.d.; Hutchins et al., 2021) and their engineering design solution generation (Zhang et al., 2019). While these approaches have deepened our understanding of student learning and problem solving, there has been little effort in helping teachers interpret and analyze these analytics measures in the context of student work in ways that can inform their instruction, and generate actionable information that is beneficial to student learning.
The current implementation of the RISE teacher dashboard is linked to the Science Projects Integrating Computing and Engineering (SPICE) curriculum (Chiu et al., 2019). Four teachers working with us are engaging in: (1) participatory dashboard design sessions that leverage student data from past implementations of the SPICE curriculum to discuss, interpret, and plan the displays associated with student performance and behavior as they work on formative assessments, model building, and engineering design tasks; (and 2) professional development (PD) sessions in which they will use prototype implementations of the dashboard and discuss how the information presented may influence their classroom teaching activities. The PD activities will also cover lesson plans and assessments for the three-week SPICE curriculum that they will cover in Fall 2021. During classroom instruction in the Fall, we will record video and audio data and conduct post-class teacher interviews as they reflect on their students' performance and learning behaviors. We will extend and apply existing teacher noticing analysis frameworks to study how teachers combine the use of the analytics presented using the RISE dashboard with their classroom experiences to guide students computational and engineering design tasks.
This project addresses the need to design and develop learning technology that better engages teachers in their students’ application of key 21st century problem-solving practices and domains.

Authors

• Nicole Hutchins, Vanderbilt University

• Gautam Biswas, Vanderbilt University