EXP: Inq-Blotter - A Real Time Alerting Tool to Transform Teachers' Assessment of Science Inquiry Practices

“网络学习和未来学习技术计划”资助的工作旨在支持展望学习技术的未来，并推进我们对人们如何在技术丰富的环境中学习的了解。网络学习探索（EXP）项目设计和构建新的学习技术，以探索其可行性，了解有效使用它们所面临的挑战，并研究它们促进学习的潜力。这个EXP项目解决了教师对实时诊断工具的需求，这些工具可以评估学生的需求，即提供形成性评估，以改善科学教学。该项目将扩展、试点、实施和研究Inq-Blotter，这是一个可扩展的、基于网络的警报系统，使教师能够对中学生的物理科学科学实践进行形成性评估，与新发布的国家框架“下一代科学标准”保持一致。Inq-Blotter提醒系统将与Inq-ITS（查询智能辅导系统）一起使用，在Inq-ITS中，学生通过模拟进行查询来“展示他们所知道的”。学生们提出问题，设计和进行实验，解释数据，用数据证明他们的主张，并交流他们的发现。当学生学习时，Inq-ITS的算法会对他们进行实时评估。为了完成形成性评估循环，Inq-Blotter提醒工具会向教师的笔记本电脑和智能手机发送有关学生探究技能的实时提醒，以便教师知道谁最需要帮助，哪些技能最需要帮助。将分析师生之间的话语，以更好地理解该警报系统如何支持教师对探究的实时指导，以及如何促进学生实时学习探究实践并将其转移到后续活动中，从而有助于了解如何教授和学习科学探究。Inq-ITS的独特之处在于它能够使用基于知识工程和数据挖掘的算法自动评估查询，从而使可靠的警报成为可能。通过在Inq-Blotter中添加日志记录和时间戳，记录教师与其界面的每次交互，pi将引入在极细粒度范围内捕获和分析师生交互的能力，从而最大限度地利用Inq-ITS的算法评估能力。这种将大规模实时测量学生探究实践与一种技术工具相结合的方法，可以促进实时、有针对性的教学，从而彻底改变教师在基于探究的科学教学中与学生的互动方式。该项目将推动使用基于技术的方法来关闭定义不清的科学探究领域的形成性评估循环的艺术状态。本研究还将证明围绕这一技术流派的更广泛的原则，以便指导其他教师警报工具的人机界面设计，并告知如何在这些工具中最好地利用学习分析技术。

The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that support envisioning the future of learning technologies and advance what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Cyberlearning Exploration (EXP) Projects design and build new kinds of learning technologies in order to explore their viability, to understand the challenges to using them effectively, and to study their potential for fostering learning. This EXP project addresses the need for real-time diagnostic tools for teachers that can assess students' needs, i.e. provide formative assessment, in order to improve science instruction. The project will extend, pilot, implement, and study Inq-Blotter, a scalable, web-based alerting system that enables teachers' formative assessment of middle school students' Physical Science scientific practices, aligned to the newly released national framework Next Generation Science Standards. The Inq-Blotter alerting system will be used in conjunction with Inq-ITS (Inquiry Intelligent Tutoring System), in which students "show what they know" by conducting inquiry with simulations. Students form questions, design and conduct experiments, interpret data, warrant their claims with data, and communicate their findings. As students work, they are assessed in real-time by the algorithms of Inq-ITS. To complete the formative assessment loop, the Inq-Blotter alerting tool sends real time alerts to teachers' laptops and smartphones on students' inquiry skills so that the teachers know who needs the most help and on which skills. Discourse between teachers and students will be analyzed to better understand how this alerting system can support teachers' real-time instruction of inquiry and how it can foster students to learn inquiry practices in real-time and transfer them to subsequent activities, thereby contributing to practical knowledge about how science inquiry is taught and learned.Unique to Inq-ITS is its ability to automatically assess inquiry using algorithms based on knowledge-engineering and data mining, making reliable alerting possible. By adding logging and timestamping to Inq-Blotter of every interaction a teacher has with its interface, the PIs will introduce the ability to capture and analyze teacher-student interactions on an extremely fine-grained scale, in turn allowing for maximum leverage of the algorithmic assessment capability of Inq-ITS. This combination of measuring students' inquiry practices in real-time at scale with a technological tool that facilitates real-time, targeted instruction could revolutionize how teachers interact with students during inquiry-based science instruction. The project will advance the state of the art of using a technology-based approach to close the formative assessment loop for the ill-defined domain of science inquiry. This research will also evince the broader principles surrounding this technological genre so as to guide the design of human-computer interfaces of other alerting tools for teachers and inform how learning-analytics techniques can best be utilized in such tools.