When students start prepping for a standardized exam a good first step is to assess ability level.  Grockit students accomplish this by taking a diagnostic test shortly after they sign up.  From there students need to know where to focus their study time and how they are progressing.  Today, we released a feature that displays student progress over time.  This new feature is best explained with an example.

The screenshot to the right shows the GMAT Achievements for a particular student.  Please notice the purple badge about half-way down that indicates this student took a verbal diagnostic on 8/11/2009 and scored in the 91^st percentile of all Grockit GMAT students.  A score this high indicates this student has high ability in the verbal section of the GMAT exam.  The next day she took a quantitative diagnostic and only scored in the 51^st percentile.  Knowing there was plenty of room to improve in this subject of the exam she began to focus a majority of her study time on practicing quantitative questions.

You can see that every few weeks she took a quantitative challenge to get an updated assessment of her ability level.  She steadily improved all the way to the 94^th percentile by time she took her last challenge.

This student should now feel confident about doing well in the quantitative section of the GMAT and may begin to balance her study time more evenly with the verbal section.  This optimization of study time is of great benefit to test takers.  Stay tuned to our blog to learn about future feature releases that help students in a similar way.

The slides above were prepared to accompany my paper, Interaction synchronicity in web-based collaborative learning systems. Here’s a summary:

In building a web-based platform to support live collaborative learning online, we’ve faced (and continue to face) a variety of technical challenges. One significant challenge has been the mismatch between what the web was designed for — namely, a network of linked documents — and what we’re using it for — a network of live collaborations. Different learning systems deal with this mismatch in different ways. Some systems stick with the web-native document-oriented model, and support asynchronous (i.e. different time) collaborative interactions around “content”, “educational resources”, or “learning objects”. Other systems support live, synchronous (i.e. same time) collaborative interactions by relying on better-suited network protocols, but do not run within a browser. Finally, a growing class of systems, including Grockit, have chosen to engineer a way to support live user interactions on the Web. For us, the motivation for engineering a solution is to enable you to use Grockit from the comfort of most any web browser on most any computer. If you’ve participated in one of our learning games / study groups, you know how convenient this can be.

But just because the “hard” work is done (read: supporting synchronous interactions on the web) doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to pass on doing the “easier” work (read: supporting asynchronous interactions.) If you’ve spent time reviewing your Grockit study sessions and reading through the explanations and discussion threads, you’d probably agree that this, too, can be quite valuable. Here’s where I think that it gets interesting: If we can support both synchronous and asynchronous interactions among learners, how do we know which to use? Which interactions should to be synchronous? Which should be asynchronous? Which should be a mix? What should that mix be?

There are no clear correct (or incorrect) answers here, so it’s been an interesting challenge trying to figure out what seems to work best. In the paper, I share a few lessons that we’ve learned in the course of grappling with this, including:

• implications of question complexity
• implications of activity visibility
• implications of continuous communication
• implications for discussion repurposing
• implications of group size on discussion dynamics
• implications of community size on group formation

If you’re interested in learning more, you can read the full paper.

Over on our GMAT Blog today we are fortunate to have a guest post from Stacy Blackman who leads a premier admission consulting service.  Stacy Blackman Consulting has helped clients gain admission to every top business school in the world.  In the post she offers application essay tips which are applicable to all college admissions.  There is also a coupon code exclusive for Grockit blog readers for her firm’s newly released school specific application essay guides.  Check out her great tips here.

In addition, we are learning from the many thought leaders in e-learning that are here.  You will see some of this reflected in future Grockit features.

Jump to Mission to Learn’s site to listen to the podcast.

On November 13th, I’ll be speaking at the DevLearn conference in San Jose. I’m really looking forward to the opportunity. The conference hosts experienced and knowledgeable professionals in the e-Learning industry to explore the best ideas and technologies.  Here is a summary of my talk:

How Technology is Revolutionizing Education

There are several ways to resolve the broken process of traditional education. One way to address this problem is to use artificial intelligence to build adaptive learning software systems that are as effective as personal tutoring. Another is to take advantage of how students naturally learn by applying algorithms to optimize several traditional learning environments: study groups, private tutoring sessions, study halls, and the traditional classroom environment.

Game dynamics can also motivate students to study for longer periods, and help students encourage one another. Diagnostics and adaptive challenges offer students individually-targeted study sessions. Students are naturally technologically savvy these days, and making learning fun and accessible in a social networking setting creates a study environment that is approachable for all students. Collaborative learning can be introduced into the classroom, the home, or wherever students may be.

This session will address the issues facing traditional education today, discuss resolutions to these problems, and how technology will revolutionize the educational paradigm.
In this session, you will learn:

• Why and how the traditional educational paradigm is broken
• Some solutions for this problem
• Why technology will revolutionize the traditional education system
• Why game-play and social-networking features are so effective for our students today

Please leave a comment if you have questions or suggestions on other points to discuss in the presentation.  Grockit will also have an exhibit at the conference to show our latest features.  If you will be in attendance be sure to come by and say hello.

David Talking to Counselors

The feedback on Grockit’s SAT and ACT test prep games from counselors was overwhelmingly positive.  In addition, while talking with counselors we discussed some of the issues facing students today.  Many students simply can not afford expensive test prep services or private tutoring.  The counselors were excited to learn about Grockit’s current free offering of SAT and ACT test prep.  The counselors also shared with us the lack of interest by many students in traditional test prep offerings such as studying out of a book or in the classroom.  They indicated the collaborative games approach Grockit offers would be more appealing to those students.

In sum, it was a great conference and we are happy to have attended.  We should give recognition to the people of Baltimore for their hospitality.  The locals were friendly and generous hosts.  We now look forward to NACAC in St. Louis next year.

Standards are not going away. Standardized tests are just a method of assessing the extent to which students and schools are meeting standards. There is no difference between a standardized test and a regular test other than how they are scored. We have used tests for in school standards since the beginning of education.

There is no option that will ever involve eliminating standards or the tests that measure them. The efforts of those wishing to do away with them would be far better suited to steering the standards and the methods we use to attain them. The number of these tests will increase every year and this will never end. The sociological reasons for this have to do with an ever increasing population size and the increasing complexity and difficulty in evaluating and comparing individuals and groups in the population. The only interesting option to me is getting us to the point where every student can easily meet the standards that we lay out as a society for what we expect someone to learn while in school.

Grockit’s vision is not about standardized tests. Our vision is one of collaborative learning and a technologically advanced learning platform for individuals, groups and experts. We believe this educational design is so powerful that it can help us get closer to a vision of every student passing standards. We also believe this vision is just as well applied to all forms of collaborative learning, not just standardized tests. We’ve even begun piloting Grockit in schools as part of a general learning platform that has nothing to do with standardized tests.

The problem in education is not standardized tests. It’s the system design itself. Industrialized mass education is a recent educational design that’s just over a hundred years old. It is a design that moves students through school as though it were a factory and teachers the factory workers. This design is the root cause of schools being boring and un-motivating for students. A better system design will get every kid passing standards.

Standards are, of course, necessary and useful. The problem lies in thinking that just by applying standards things will improve. That is to say that implementing a national and state level standardized testing plan will not itself improve standards. It’s the remediation of students that will improve standards and that has to do with educational system design, not the existence or not of standardized tests.

I think we’ll get a lot more mileage out of evaluating and re-designing our educational system and emphasizing collaborative learning than we will by eliminating or promoting standardized tests.

Brian at the Grockit Demo Table

We were invited back to the TechCrunch 50 Conference to show our progress since our launch at last year’s event.  The conference provides a platform for early-stage companies to launch for the first time to the technology industry’s most influential people.  Here is a short list of new Grockit features added in the past year:

• SAT and ACT Games
• Artificial intelligence that allow for adaptive solo games
• Custom games
• Detailed performance analytics
• Expert tutors available in the platform

The feedback from conference attendees on our new features was very positive and we were honored to part of TechCrunch 50 again.  As usual, they put together a terrific event full of tech celebs and promising new startups.  Thanks to TechCrunch for hosting us.  We wish the best of luck to all the startups that launched at the conference.