Growth of 1:1

The renewed wave of interest and implementation of 1:1 projects in schools recently has been obvious – all over schools are evaluating iPads and other tablets, netbooks, and, given the continued price point decline, laptops.  BYOD, once a quickly dismissed subject in the K12 community not that many years ago, is a deservedly hot topic of interest among educators.  With the growing proliferation of smartphones – and tablets – among teens today BYOD is an acceptable strategy for many schools.  Schools are in process of implementing a 1:1 initiative with one of these technologies, or moving to a blended model with multiple devices that are shared or spread across grades according to best fit. In all cases these initiatives decrease the student-to-computing device ratio, approaching 1:1.

• iPhone ownership among teens is now 34 percent, up from 23 percent in the fall and 17 percent last spring.
• By fall 2012, the firm expects teen iPhone ownership could be at 40 to 45 percent.
• iPad ownership is likely to approach 30 percent by the fall, compared with 24 percent currently.
• All school IT managers expected within five to 10 years their school to have a one-on-one device-to-student ratio.
• “The majority of IT managers believed that bring-your-own-device policies would be the major driver in achieving a one-to-one ratio,” according to the report.

1:1 Benefits

The benefits of the accelerated interest in 1:1 and associated increased student access to technology are numerous.   The ability for students to consume content – individually – is powerful.  Online textbooks, educational multimedia, interactive software, collaborative learning portals, and online learning are just a few examples of how increase device access can aid student learning.

However, many institutions implementing 1:1 today have overlooked an additional benefit – the capability of implementing balanced assessment.  The focus of the initiatives has been on providing software and media that students consume – the ‘sexier’ use case – rather than using the devices as a generator of student performance data.

Balanced Assessment

Assessment as a whole remains a strong requirement.  This is particularly true for students to demonstrate knowledge through summative assessment, and for schools and districts to show adequate performance with this data.  On the other end of the assessment spectrum, formative assessment has long been proven through research to accelerate student learning.  In 1998, Black and Wiliam reported that typical effect sizes found in formative assessment experiments were between 0.4 and 0.7. These are large effect sizes, and are much bigger than most of those found for educational interventions.

In their 1998 article, “Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment”, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam state that firm evidence shows that formative assessment is an essential component of classroom work and that its development can raise standards of achievement.  In addition, they stated that they know of no other way of raising standards for which such a strong prima facie case can be made.

Black and Wiliam’s review paper sparked renewed interest in formative assessment, both in research and in practice.  Unfortunately though, assessment today is still largely unbalanced towards summative only, as teachers often find it too difficult and time consuming to deliver, score, and analyze assessments with traditional paper, pencil, and/or bubble cards.

Opportunity

There is a clear opportunity for the growth of student computing devices to create a balanced assessment.  Assessment solutions that have built-in teacher collaboration tools, automated scoring, and standards aligned performance reporting make it easy for teachers to use formative assessment to quickly identify student knowledge to inform and differentiate instruction.  In addition, student data gathered through common assessments – anything from formative textbook section quizzes through to grade level benchmark exams – can feed data-starved initiatives such as PLCs and teacher effectiveness programs.

While some districts and schools are taking advantage of this opportunity, for many others it is lower on the priority list – the oft forgotten ‘stepchild’ of the 1:1 or BYOD initiative.  In these districts some individual teachers, in their excitement about eliminating pencil, paper, and bubble cards, are implementing free tools on their own.  Unfortunately, while some of these tools do provide automatic scoring of some question types, they do not provide a method to share or collaborate in item and assessment development, nor to share and collaborate with students results for common assessments. Further, these free tools lack performance measures and reporting features – they do not provide for alignment to state standards and student progress measurements – thus missing by far the biggest opportunities for gains in teacher productivity and student achievement.

How You Can Take Action

We invite you to learn more about how you can maximize the use of your 1:1 or BYOD initiative with balanced assessment, or learn how other districts are using Naiku, by contacting us to arrange for a WebEx.  Please contact us at sales@naiku.net or 612-35-NAIKU to schedule your webinar today.

This is a special guest article from one of our Naiku Star teachers. Len Beard is mathematics teacher at Scott Highlands Middle School in Apple Valley, Minnesota.

NAIKU- The Missing Piece of the Puzzle

I’ve been ‘flipping’ my classroom for nearly a decade. I pre-test and post-test each chapter and use the pretests as a formative assessment to guide my instruction. The data tells me the strengths and weakness of each of my students. This allows me to give students more individual attention. To make this curriculum approach really effective students should be able to view content and take assessments on their own wireless devices, either in school or at home.

Len Beard's Students Taking a Test on Naiku

In the past, gathering and sorting the data involved using a combination of spreadsheets and databases to compile and report the information – VERY time-consuming and difficult to teach to new teachers. Using the software that came with our curriculum to analyze our formative assessment results restricted us to a computer lab – an unacceptable option. We heard about Naiku from our district office and less than 2 weeks after contacting Naiku, we were siting with Corey Thompson, Naiku CEO, writing our own tests. Class lists and individual student information with user names and passwords had already been created for us. We have used Naiku ever since. Students really like being able to use their own devices to take math tests.

I was especially thankful that we could simply import the tests we had already written with the previous software. The Naiku platform is user-friendly for both students and teachers. Students get immediate feedback and the opportunity to analyze, reflect, and write about their mistakes. And, parents have complete access to their child’s tests — another wonderful feature. Teachers see class and individual results as soon as students complete the test. Results are reported by student, class, or standard. The collaborative design of Naiku allows us to share our assessments with other teachers in our school or district. The only thing better than the software is the support you get from the Naiku team. Naiku supplies the missing piece to make flipping a classroom really work for everyone.

A teen’s “love of novelty,” Dobbs says, “leads directly to useful experience. More broadly, the hunt for sensation provides the inspiration needed to get you out of the house and into new terrain.” Teachers can engage their students by taking advantage of the new and novel.

Another of Dobb’s points that gives teachers a reason to consider using handheld web devices as much as possible is a teen’s tendency to gravitate toward their peers. Teens want “to invest in the future rather than the past. We enter a world made by our parents, but we will live most of our lives, and prosper (or not) in a world run and remade by our peers.” Teenagers are biologically wired to want to learn how to use devices that will help them survive in the future. Naiku is a cutting edge way for teachers to assess student learning. That fact is not lost on teens; they’re more inclined to learn if the tool is something that they can imagine themselves using in the future. That Naiku will save the teacher a lot of time is a bonus for the teacher in addition to the satisfaction they get from engaging their students in learning in ways that make sense to the teenage brain.

Naiku is excited to be among the first 35 companies allowed to develop on the platform. Naiku already has a Community Page (http://www.edmodo.com/publisher/naiku) on Edmodo. We look forward to extending the partnership with Edmodo to make the Naiku Assessment Platform available to the broader Edmodo community of teachers.

With the Naiku app on the Edmodo App Store, teachers will be able to engage their students in assessments like they’ve never done before. Students will engage in what Naiku calls “reflective testing”; enabling them gain insights into their learning. Naiku is already optimized for tablet and mobile delivery. So the decision to provide a Naiku app on Edmodo fits nicely with our core competencies and mission.

I did a little research on how the computer lab started, and have come to the conclusion that they are an out-growth of the experiential learning push from the 1970′s – the language lab, the science lab, the math lab and the computer lab.  Experiential learning is a great thing – so the concept behind the labs is a great thing too.  Often to get something started, it is important to have a space where experimentation can happen until everyone figures out “how it works.”  When you figure out how it works, then you transition out of the “startup space” and make it generally available to everyone.

The exciting thing about computing devices is that unlike a science or language lab, the computer is portable multi-purpose tool.  It can be used in many different subjects and many different ways.  More exciting is that 4-5 years ago these computing devices became portable and powerful enough to be used across subjects.  Even more exciting is that the price point for these powerful portable devices (iPads, Android tablets, laptops, Chromebooks, etc.) is coming down to where a 1:1 situation possible.  In bring-your-own-device (BYOD) situations, there might even be more than one device per student.

So, if these devices can be powerful, portable and priced-right, can we take the goal of the “lab” and expand it to cover the entire school?  Or better yet, cover the entire teacher and student population, wherever they are?

We’re already on this path. Of course, the challenge will not actually be deploying the devices, providing wi-fi, network management, etc. – these are just events that will happen –  The real challenge is how educators will leverage the situation for instruction. Is it enough to play a mobile/social game of Oregon Trail? Do books need to be graphical and interactive? How will real-time assessment information be used to change instruction real-time in the classroom?

In Naiku, metacognition is a big deal! I often wonder how  metacognition came to play such an important role in the Naiku Assessment Platform. Is it because I spent roughly two years doing research on the feeling-of-knowing, an important metacognitive decision-making process (Nhouyvanisvong & Reder, 1998) as a psychology graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University and have subconsciously advocated for its inclusion in our assessment software? Or is it because metacognition, when students engage in these regulatory thinking processes, plays an important role in changing testing moments to learning moments (i.e., changing assessment of learning into assessment for learning)? I’d like to believe it’s the latter; but as a psychologist, I can’t deny nor confirm any subconscious activity.

Two Stages of Metacognition in Naiku

So, how is metacognition incorporated into the Naiku Assessment Platform? In Naiku, students engage in metacognitive thinking in two stages during the assessment process. In these two stages, student are asked to assess their ability and to compare this assessment to actual performance. In combination, these two processes help students make appropriate and necessary changes to their learning.

Prediction

In this first stage, students predict their capability to solve the problem. They do this by rating how confident they are in their answer. After answering each question (i.e., solving each problem), students predict how confident they are in their answer. If they are sure that they have solved the problem correctly, they rate their confidence as high. If they are unsure of their answer, they rate their confidence as uncertain. If they do not think that they have solved the problem correctly, they rate their confidence as low.

Reflection

In this second stage, students contrast their actual performance with their prediction. Through reflection, students contrast how they performed (whether they answered the question correctly or incorrectly) with their prediction (their confidence rating). Students reflect on why they answered the question correctly or incorrectly, choosing from one of six reflection tags. They also journal about these reflections to further enhance their learning.

Next Blogs

In the next two blogs, I will explore these two stages in detail. First, I will explore the importance of prediction and how it impacts student learning. I will then explore how reflection improves student learning.

References

Nhouyvanisvong, A. and Reder, L. M. (1998). “Rapid Feeling-of-Knowing: A Strategy Selection Mechanism.” In Yzerbyt, V. Y., Lories, G., Dardenne, B. (Eds.), Metacognition: Cognitive and social dimensions (pp. 35-52). London: Sage.

A process engineer would agree with management – largely because task-switching eats up most of the time saved.  To really improve productivity, the engineer would recommend that the task is

1. effectively eliminated, and/or
2. replaced with one of higher value

In schools, there lots of tasks that would benefit from some automation. Important tasks – sometimes called the “jobs-to-be-done.”

Spreadsheets are the classic technology example. For decades, analysts and engineers of all types were forced to compute their data by hand – using the same formulas over-and-over (called “turning the numbers.”)  When a small parameter would change, re-compute. By hand.  Even with tools such as slide rulers, doing all of these calculations took hours.

Then spreadsheets came along, and suddenly the analyst could re-calculate everything in less than a second. Hand-calculating formulas as a task was eliminated.  It was quickly replaced with a new task: analyzing the output and making decisions.  The analysts without access to spreadsheet software were suddenly at a disadvantage.

Teachers hand-scoring assessments is a lot like an analyst “turning the numbers” with slide rulers.  Providing a solution for teachers has been difficult because students didn’t have easy access to technology.  (Indeed the analysts in the above example had the same problem – access to computers.)  But students are gaining access to technology at an incredible rate – and when access to technology is no longer our blocker, the question becomes “which teachers get the spreadsheet software and which are stuck with slide rulers?”

 …or rather, which teachers are stuck hand-scoring and which teachers get everything packaged-up as information so they can make instructional decisions?

This isn’t to say that the “right” to use paper or hand-score should be taken-away. Sometimes the best instructional insights are revealed this way!

For the first graph, look how most of the age brackets have a pretty linear profile – the more they make, the more likely it is that they will have a smartphone. Now look at the youngest age bracket – the angled profile is not there. It is more flat. This is fascinating.  While the K-12 demographic (< 18 years old) is not profiled, you can only imagine how important these devices are to them.

I’m sure there will be plenty of commentary on these findings, such as “Why would people with a lower income be finding money to own an expensive smartphone?”  There are probably plenty of arguments for and against this behavior – a strong argument for is that it may be the only computer in the home.

Regardless of these positions, what is apparent is that the smartphone is on a fast-track to ubiquity. Here are the charts:

The next-generation of Naiku makes using mobile devices and tablets in the classroom easier than ever.

Minneapolis, MN, February 20, 2012 – Naiku, a leader of cloud-based balanced assessment software K-12 education announced version 2.0 of the award-winning Naiku Platform.  Naiku is a best-in-class SaaS platform that enables teachers to make “real-time” instructional decisions to improve student achievement.  Version 2.0 is available for immediate use and requires absolutely zero “app deployment” to get started.

New features include:

• Complete support for Common Core standards
• A streamlined assessment creation process
• Auto-scoring of short-answer text, number, and range question types
• In-browser “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) math formula creation
• Additional Formative Assessment features such as Answer Justification, Confidence Check and Teacher Feedback
• New real-time reporting for students, teachers and administrators
• School information system (SIS) connection agents for nightly class roster synchronization

“I’m excited to announce version 2.0 and further build on our leadership in the mobile assessment space,” said Corey Thompson, CEO of Naiku. “The market reaction has been so positive … our marketing and development teams just keep delivering the features our customers are requesting.”

As technology becomes more affordable and ubiquitous, many schools across the United States have started a “one student-to-device” (1:1) or Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program.  As these programs spread, it is critical that these devices are used to improve instruction and increase student achievement. Our mission is to work with schools to make these initiatives wildly successful.

About Naiku

Based in Minneapolis, MN, Naiku provides schools with a powerful “balanced assessment” system, enabling teachers and administrators to gather real-time data in the classroom and across the district. Developed specifically for mobile devices and tablets such as iPads™, iPods™, iPhones™, Android-based phones, tablets and Chromebooks™ (and providing full compatibility with laptops and desktops), Naiku has established itself as a leader in balanced assessment.

The word Naiku means “teacher” in Lao.

Often we find teachers that want to use Naiku, but feel pressure not to use technology because of an “equity” issue. This is the technology equity issue – making sure that all students have access to comparable technology.  But it isn’t equitable when teachers teaching in lower-socioeconomic areas to be left behind as more teachers in more affluent areas race ahead, leveraging technology that saves them time and enhances the teacher-student learning relationship.

Recently I was demonstrating Naiku to a school in a less-affluent area. Many of the teachers wanted to use Naiku, but felt that their school’s lack of technology infrastructure and their student’s inequity of Internet access in their homes would preclude them from using Naiku.  One teacher saw it differently.

He had the idea to use Naiku to auto-score homework. After a brief discussion about how the homework questions were already available “in the book,” for students without computers or Internet at home, the other teachers were excited about using Naiku to reduce their burden to score homework every evening. It quickly became clear that technology access and use is not a binary decision, but one that had many gradients.  No longer was the question about everyone having an iPad, or nobody having an iPad.

In the above example, because Naiku works with many types of devices, many students are able to use Naiku. For these students, homework could be auto-scored.  For those without Internet, they continued to hand-in their homework as usual.  Teachers saved time, they shared tests and quizzes with each other, and we learned about another way to save teachers time.

This is the third in a series of posts on using technology to reestablish the learning connection between the student and teacher.