The Medium is the Message, and the Gizmo is the Quiz

For those of you who may at some point have thought to yourselves , "Wow, Gizmos are not only great teaching and learning tools, they would make great assessment items too!", you are not alone. At ExploreLearning, we've been thinking the same thing for a number of years, and thanks to the National Science Foundation we are now feverishly working on a functional system of this kind. [Backstory: last summer ExploreLearning was awarded a major grant from the NSF to develop a next-generation online assessment system that uses Gizmo-like interactivities to measure student's conceptual understanding in math and science].

In fact, I was in Phoenix recently for a NSF conference to report on the progress we're making. We had great feedback from other conference attendees, both from people in the educational software field as well as from researchers in other domains whose chief connection to education is that they have kids of their own who are struggling to understand topics like fractions or graphing motion! The buzz at the conference paralleled many of the things we are hearing and reading these days [see some URLs below], which all seem to be pointing to a need for a system that allows educators to probe students' conceptualizations of math and science topics in a more significant way than is practical using paper/pencil multiple-choice tests.

In addition to enabling educators to assess students on objectives that are traditionally difficult to measure (such as scientific reasoning ability), such a system would also generate data that teachers can use to adapt subsequent instruction more effectively -- for example, identifying specific difficulties that individual students or groups are experiencing, and then addressing these in the next lesson before these difficulties become major impediments to mastering more complex concepts/skills down the road.

Within a few months, we're hoping to be at the point where we can release some demos for the ExploreLearning community to play with and give feedback on. If you would like to be notified when we have a demo available, or would like more information on the project, just drop me (Paul Cholmsky) an email at pcholmsky@explorelearning.com

If you'd like to read more about the issues this project is addressing, take a look at:

Ready or Not (District Administration magazine; 08/04)

Includes this quote from Assistant Secretary of Education Susan Sclafani:
"You can do [hands-on testing] with a random selection of students, but you can't do that when you want to test every student. There are just too many kids," Sclafani says. "It's not cost effective to try to set up a performance-based measure. But by using simulation you can simulate those experiences and give students the chance to demonstrate what they know."

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Show Me the Numbers: How data drives school and student improvement (District Administration magazine; 09/04)

Describes how data from tests administered during a course of study are being used to manage subsequent instruction and individualize students’ learning paths.

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Open-Ended Items Better Reveal Students' Mathematical Thinking (NCTM News Bulletin, 07/04)

Wendy Sanchez and Nicole Ice are the new editors of the Assessment Issues column in NCTM News Bulletin -- several of their recent columns have called attention to issues related to our project, e.g., why open ended assessment items are so useful.

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Thanks!