By Lillian Mongeau

To get a better understanding of how well students can solve complex problems and apply science to real-life scenarios, the National Assessment for Education Progress recently used hands-on experiments as a way to test 4th, 8th, and 12th grade students, and found that this kind of assessment gives a much more accurate reflection of student comprehension.

Results from a 2009 round of testing called The Nation’s Report Card Science in Action: Hands-On and Interactive Computer Task, examined 6,000 students—2,000 at each grade level—from across the country. Students performed tasks like testing water samples (12th grade) and assembling electric circuits (4th grade). They also participated in interactive computer tasks that simulated longer term experiments, like observing plant growth. In both scenarios, students were evaluated on their ability to perform the tasks, observe the results and draw conclusions.

“The bottom line is, we learned so much more that we couldn’t have learned from those paper and pencil tests,” said Jack Buckley, commissioner at the National Center for Education Statistics, which creates the annual “Nation’s Report Card” based on the results of tests like this one administered by the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP).

But what they learned was a mixed bag.

A majority of students at all grade levels (76 percent) were able to perform the simpler experiments correctly and accurately observe the results. However, when experiments involved more complicated data sets, students’ ability to execute and observe fell sharply — only 36 percent of students tested across grade levels were able to complete the tasks under these conditions.

The test also revealed a disconnect between observation and explanation. Even though a majority of students (71 percent) were able to draw the correct conclusions from the results of their experiments, less than a third (30 percent) were able to explain their results.

For example, one of the hands-on tasks for 12th grade students was to determine the best location for a new town based on water quality. The students were expected to test various water samples for specific pollutants and then compare those levels to a chart put out by the Environmental Protection Agency. A whopping 75 percent of students were able to do this accurately. But when it came time to make a recommendation for where the new town should be built, only 11 percent of students were able to explain their recommendation using the data they’d collected.

The conclusion? “[Students] can conduct science investigations using limited data sets, but many students lack the ability to explain results. The report shows that students were challenged by parts of investigations requiring more variables to manipulate, strategic decision-making in collecting data, and the explanation of why a certain result was the correct conclusion,” the report states.

For the most part, student performance broke down as it usually does along ethnic and economic lines. Low-income students performed worse than their wealthier peers and black and Latino students performed worse than their white and Asian counterparts. However, there were a few notable exceptions.

On some parts of some tests, black and Latino students did as well or nearly as well as white students. For example, on a computer task that required 4th grade students to observe plant growth, 80 percent of students came to the correct conclusion. Eighty-one percent of white students got the right answer, 79 percent of black students did and 74 percent of Hispanic students did. (Eighty-six percent of Asian and Pacific Islander students got that one right.)

What’s more, though male students generally outperform female students on the national science assessment, female students beat male students on the hands-on tasks.

Alan Friedman, a physicist and the chair of the committee in charge of developing national assessments, said that as a scientist he was relieved that students did well on the first section of the test. “There’s no way for them to memorize for this test. You really had to think on your feet,” he said.

Still, Friedman said, he wasn’t shocked that students struggled to explain their results. “Unfortunately, that’s not surprising,” he said.

Though hands-on standardized tests aren’t brand new, they have historically been too expensive and complicated to use on a wide scale. And the technology needed for interactive computer tasks has not been up to snuff until recent years.

Officials at NAEP said tests like these are more accurate and provide far more detailed results.  Buckley said they must become the norm to keep up with new curriculum standards meant to keep pace with the changing world of science and technology.

“We’re in a really good position to provide models for assessment,” Buckley said, that can “provide information on what students can know and do that’s called for in the new standards.”

A 6th-grade student's rendering of what's inside the computer.

By Sheena Vaidyanathan

Have you ever looked inside a laptop? Have you ever held a CPU or studied the components on a computer motherboard? Though we use computers everyday, many of us know little about the fascinating world inside.

In the spirit of tech innovation that’s defined Silicon Valley, every sixth grader in the Los Altos School District will be able to describe what goes on inside a computer. Students spend several classes studying a computer motherboard, drawing it in their notebooks and creating a 3D model of the computer on the computer. This hardware lesson is part of a required weekly class in a program that teaches science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) with a focus on creativity, collaboration and computer science.

Along with computer hardware, students learn the art of drawing from observation; the ability to simplify what is complex. Students use their pencil drawings to create a 3D model on the computer using Google SketchUp, a free application. Using the tool is not exactly new to these students — they used it to create 3D models of houses in a digital design class in the fifth grade.

Students are encouraged to use their own interpretation and creativity in designing the 3D model. They don’t have to make it look exactly like the original, and can create their own work style. Some quickly make blocks and label them; others go back several times to the physical motherboard in the classroom to re-check the drawing and count out the exact number of components and relative sizes. The completed models are colored, labeled and then exported to a 2D image so they can be added to the student’s Google site as part of their e-Portfolio for the class. (Check out their samples here.)

Besides this computer hardware lesson, students learn vector graphics, binary numbers, computer programming, and how to post onto their Google sites. They work in teams to create video games using Scratch, a programming language from MIT.

But these students are not just learning about technology; they’re learning computational thinking skills, a problem-solving process that includes the ability to formulate problems so a computer can solve them. Some consider computational thinking one of the key skills in the digital age.

This class, along with the fifth-grade computer programming class, the implementation of the Khan Academy and collaborative online homework, is part of the school district’s aim to teach students to go beyond being consumers of technology, but to become creators using technology. Having learned how computers work on the inside, and how to program the computer, the goal is to get students to use the computer as a tool to express their creativity.

Sheena Vaidyanathan teaches 3D design and computer programming to students in the Los Altos School District in California.

Flickr: AngryJulieMonday

By Heather Chaplin

Since MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group released Scratch in 2007, kids ages 8 to 13 have built more than 2.2 million animations, games, music, videos and stories using the kid-friendly programming language.

Scratch allows kids to snap together graphical blocks of instructions, like Lego bricks, to control sprites—the movable objects that perform actions. Sprites can dance, sing, run and talk.

Now, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Lifelong Kindergarten is collaborating with Tufts University’s DevTech Research Group to make Scratch Jr, a new version aimed at kids in preschool to second grade. The expected launch date is summer 2012.

The new project raises questions about childhood development and digital learning, and just how early kids should be introduced to computers.

Mitch Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten group, spearheaded the creation of Scratch. Having worked with a network of afterschool programs using digital media, Resnick was struck by the lack of software that enabled kids to go beyond playing with other people’s media. There was nothing that encouraged them to make their own interactive stories and games.

“What’s most important to me is that young children start to develop a relationship with the computer where they feel they’re in control,” Resnick said. “We don’t want kids to see the computer as something where they just browse and click. We want them to see digital technologies as something they can use to express themselves.”

There’s been a lot of buzz in the last few years about what it means to be literate in the 21st century. To Resnick, teaching kids to program was like teaching children of another generation how to write.

“At one point, there was a growing realization that people needed to learn how to write as well as read,” Resnick said. “They needed to be able to express themselves as well as understand how other people expressed themselves. Now it’s the same with new media. It’s not enough to be able to interact with new technologies; you have to be able to create with new technologies.”

The problem, though, is that programming languages like Java and C++ are difficult to learn. Resnick and his team imagined a language that would be more “tinkerable,“ as he calls it—more accessible. They also wanted the language to encourage kids to create work that was “personally meaningful,” as opposed to simply manipulating numbers. Lastly, they wanted the program to have a social component so kids could share their work and learn from one another.

While Resnick was building Scratch, Marina Bers, a graduate student at MIT’s Media Lab, was focusing on younger children, building, among other things, a programming language for robotics aimed at preschool-aged children. Bers would leave MIT for a position at Tufts University, but she and Resnick stayed in touch. In 2010, they decided to partner to develop the Scratch version for a younger audience. Scratch Jr officially kicked off this last summer.

According to Bers, the challenge is creating an interface that very young children can understand. Some of the problems are straightforward, like the fact that Scratch relies on text, and the youngest children cannot yet read.

“I’ve noticed materials online for games aimed at kids pre-K to third grade where there’s this assumption that children are fluent with reading when they’re not,” said Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation. “This then becomes an exercise in frustration.”

Bers hopes to solve this problem by replacing the text of Scratch with voice-over instructions.

In focus groups with teachers and children, the Scratch Jr research team has also noticed that younger children struggle with the number of blocks needed to create a program. “The relationship between cause and effect needs to be clearer for this age group,” Bers said. The idea is to reorganize the program so kids can focus on only one thing at a time.

Younger children also have trouble distinguishing between the colors in Scratch, (Scratch Jr will be redone in bright, primary colors), and they struggle with how Scratch moves from top to bottom (Scratch Jr will move from side to side.)

The group has also been studying tutorials in videogames, which teach kids how to play without realizing they’re being taught. “We want to add something like that to Scratch Jr,” Bers said.

For children ages 3 to 8, social interaction is perhaps the most important part of the learning process. That interaction can be with a teacher, a parent, an older sibling or a neighbor, said Guernsey of The New America Foundation, but young children must be able to study the facial expressions and other reactions of this “social partner.”

“The child needs to feel that what they’re learning is important to this other person,” Guernsey said. “Then it will go into the part of the child’s brain stamped ‘important.’”

When learning moves online, this becomes an issue.

“It can be the most wonderful content in the world,” Guernsey said. “But if it’s just slid into their lives without a social partner, then a lot of learning will be lost.”

The challenge isn’t lost on Bers. “We want to promote social interaction,” she said. “The question is, how do we imbed teacher interaction into Scratch Jr?”

Bers thinks of a playground. A good playground will have swing sets and slides for the kids, as well as benches and tables and chairs for the parents. The designers of Scratch Jr are figuring out how to embed the digital equivalent of those tables and chairs.

There are many who blanch at the idea of putting such young children in front of a computer screen. Concern over “screen time” is nothing knew—it began with television. But, according to Ellen Wartella, a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, these issues are far more nuanced than most people allow. First of all, she said, there simply isn’t good long-term research to show that being in front of a screen affects children negatively now, or in the future.

“There is no evidence of harm, although there are a lot of complaints,” she said.

Wartella isn’t saying screen time is good for children at a young age. Rather, she’s saying there isn’t good evidence yet to say it’s bad. There are no high-quality long-term studies that show that too much screen time as a 3-year-old will have direct consequences when he or she is 4 or 14. And in past research on TV screen time, it’s hard to untangle the effects of other influences, like parents and income.

One mistake people make, Wartella said, is focusing on the fact of the screen itself rather than the content of what the screen is showing. “Is it bad for kids to Skype with Grandma? I don’t think anyone would say that.”

Both Wartell and Guernsey refer to “the three Cs,” when considering these issues: content, context and the child. The question isn’t whether it is inherently good or bad when a preschooler is given a videogame. Rather, the questions should be contextual: Is the child playing with a social partner or on her own? What is the educational value of the game? And what are the needs of the particular child?

“When people worry about screen time, it’s the substitution effect they’re really worried about,” Guernsey said. “What happens when a kid is so enraptured by screen activity that they won’t go outside to play in other ways? But screen time being harmful by itself, there’s no evidence of that.”

For Bers and Resnick, it comes back to preparing children to be literate—in all the ways literacy is perceived today. For real empowerment in a world flooded with digital media, people need to understand not only how to interact with it, but how to make media themselves. Teaching children as young as 5 how to program not only teaches important executive functioning skills, which is crucial for that age group, but also helps demystify the computer, Bers said.

“Computers for most people are black boxes,” she said. “I believe kids should understand objects are ‘smart’ not because they’re just smart, but because someone programmed them to be smart.

“Also,” she said, echoing Resnick, “it’s about expression. In our times, we need kids to be able to express ideas in different ways, and learning to work in Scratch, in a computational medium, will give them another way of expressing themselves.”

The post originally appeared on Spotlight for Digital Media & Learning.

TB

Computer science is not widely taught, even though programming may be one of the most important skills of the 21st century. While most schools do recognize the importance of helping students learn how to use new technologies, you’ll still find scant opportunities in K-12 classes for students to learn how to actually build those very technologies.

A report issued last year by the Association of Computing Machinery found that very few states offer K-12 computer science education at all. Just nine states allow CS courses to count towards graduation requirements for math or science. And no states require computer science for graduation.

Why the absence of CS courses from elementary and secondary schools? A recent article in Technology Horizons Journal points to a few obstacles to teaching computer science: questions about teacher certification, debates about what a CS curriculum should contain, and concerns about where CS fits into the curriculum and/or the schedule. Is computer science math? Is it science? Does it replace another course?

There are, no doubt, increasing opportunities for kids to learn programming. But these often occur as after-school projects (things like the First Lego League) or as self-directed programs (such as learning to code with online materials like Hackety Hack). While these do attract those students who are interested in programming, they do little to expose the general student population to computer science.

Studies have repeatedly shown that early exposure to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects is important in convincing students to think about STEM careers. Earlier this year, Microsoft surveyed some 500 college students pursuing STEM degrees, and nearly four out of five of them said they had made the decision to be a STEM major in high school or earlier. One in five said they made the decision in middle school or earlier. These students pointed to the influence of a particular teacher or a particular class as sparking their interest — notably, almost 70% of girls said this was what made them decide to study STEM (versus just 51% of boys).

But just one in five of these college students said that their K-12 education helped prepare them extremely well for their college courses. While that can be interpreted as a challenge to the state of STEM education broadly, this is particularly true when it comes to computer science. There are plenty of opportunities for students to take biology before stepping into a Biology 101 class in college; there are very few opportunities for students to take programming before stepping into CS 101.

“Program or be programmed,” as author Douglas Rushkoff says, noting that we must learn how to be producers not just consumers of computer technology.

But teaching computer science isn’t simply about learning to program. It’s about computational thinking, logic, reasoning, and problem solving too. These skills are imperative to what K-12 students should be learning. The challenge: finding the support among administrators and teachers to make learning computer science the way in which students gain these skills.

Daniel Choo

Within the first 60 days of its release, Microsoft sold some eight million Kinects, making it the fastest selling consumer electronics device in history (beating out the iPad and the VCR).

For those who aren’t familiar with it yet, Kinect is a sensor input device for the popular Xbox gaming console that allows gamers to play without any controllers.

It’s been less than a year since the Kinect has been available to the public, and while the rapid uptake by consumers has broken records, it still feels as though the full potential has yet to be unleashed — particularly in the classroom.

We’re probably just beginning to explore the possibilities for building and using video games for learning. Now, the Kinect adds even more dimensions to gaming, least of which is the physical and the auditory, bringing “the real world” to gaming.

The Kinect sensors include a RGB camera, a depth sensor, and a microphone — all meaning that the physical actions taken by gamers can be captured by the Kinect and used in turn to control simulations. “You are the controller,” as some of the early marketing for the device contends.

But it isn’t just this gesture-based computing that makes the Kinect interesting for educational applications. It’s the fact that the Kinect software was quickly hacked and that now Microsoft has released a software development kit (SDK) so that users can hack away, but with permission and even guidance — a big draw for both hobbyists and student hackers.

These user-created hacks are, quite frankly, a lot more impressive than some of the original games that came with the Kinect.

At the ISTE 2011 conference, Bryan Baker, a computer science teacher at Allen High School in Allen, Texas, gave a presentation on how to use Kinect and the XNA Game Studio as a way of teaching high-school-level computer science students programming and game design.

“I want to light a fire for you and your kids,” said Baker in his presentation, “because this is really cool stuff.”

It is, indeed, because SDK for Kinect helps put game development in the hands of students. It’s all free, save the cost of the Kinect device itself. The official SDK allows .NET developers to write apps in C++, C# or Visual Basic. Some of the unofficial hacks do open Kinect development to other programming languages, but as these are unofficial, they do raise some questions about how teachers handle official and unofficial “hacking.”

Nonetheless, the potentials for Kinect are still exciting, and as teachers will have the summer months to play with the official SDK, I predict we see more Kinect development occur in computer science classes in the fall. Indeed, as Baker exclaimed with delight, “Some day, this device is going to take attendance for us!”