SBIR Phase I: Teachpad - A Teach-to-Learn Paradigm for Difficult Math Concepts

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to use current research in the learning sciences to develop games that make middle school math engaging and relevant. Middle school is a crucial time in a student's educational journey as it is the period at which their self-concept of ability becomes stable. Studies show that it is also the period at which students start getting disengaged with math and there is a marked increase in negativity towards math from sixth to eighth grade. According to the National Report Card, only about a third of 8th graders in US public schools, of over 3.6 million students, score at the proficient or above level in Math every year. The goal of this proposal is to implement and test the effectiveness of a scaffolded learning and teaching environment, called the 'Teachpad', that helps middle school students learn difficult math concepts. Multiple studies have indicated that students put more effort into learning when they have to teach someone else. This project will extend these studies and evaluate whether the teachpad increases student engagement and improves learning and long term retention of difficult math concepts.The proposed project uses a "teach to learn" framework in which students teach characters in a computer game how to solve specific problems and use the feedback that they receive from the characters to evaluate how well they have understood the concepts themselves. The teachpad uses natural language input, meaning that the students can enter their instruction in plain English and can explain the solution to the problem as they would to a friend or sibling. A semantic parser extracts the useful information from this input and feeds it to a machine learning algorithm to teach a game character how to solve the problem. A model of what the character has learned is also visible to the student who can see how their instruction is working when the character is trying to solve a test problem. This project will implement the teachpad for the order of operations, and will determine how it compares to traditional classroom practices. Data will be collected in authentic educational environments, through observations and interviews to study student engagement and usability, and pretests and posttests (once after the treatment and once when students return from summer break) to evaluate learning outcomes and long term retention.