Study Tracks When Students Zone Out

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a way to detect when students using personalized learning software start to daydream. By using machine-learning algorithms on recordings of student eye movement, the researchers were able to figure out which eye patterns were associated with the mind wandering.

The study found that when students’ eyes matched “zoning out” patterns, they were less focused on the work than those students who showed “not zoning out” patterns. It also noted that when students were paying attention, their eyes bounced around the screen more.

“When you’re zoning out, you’re just fixating,” explained Sidney D’Mello, leader of the University of Colorado research team. “You’re not moving on.”

The study could lead to instructional software that monitors mind wandering in real time. That troubles Jill Barshay, a contributing editor for The Hechinger Report who writes about education research and data.

“Do we really want to curb mind wandering?” she asked. “It’s associated with creativity, and perhaps a bit of mind wandering is needed to come up with big thoughts.”

Barshay suggested the result might be used better to point out the places where the computerized learning bores students, instead of creating prompts to keep them on track.

“But what I find fascinating about this research is how data scientists have come to a conclusion that contradicts human intuition,” she wrote. “You often hear teachers say that they don’t need data to tell them what their students know. Well, this research points out that it’s hard for teachers to know when students are really absorbing something just by looking at their faces.”

Tool Brings Gaming into the Classroom

“Gameful” instruction allows students to choose assignments they think are challenging and uses software to guide them through those choices. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, recently launched a tool to make that learning approach available in the classroom.

GradeCraft employs competitive leaderboards, badges, and links to unlock information to help students work their way through the coursework. The web application also allows instructors to create course shells in the learning management system (LMS) where students are encouraged to try new things, as well as receive analytics about their progress.

“Everyone starts at zero and then they build toward mastery of the course material,” Barry Fishman, a U-M professor who helped developed the tool, said in a university release. “We get questions about how rigorous a course is given how many students earn high grades, but we consistently hear instructors describe their students doing creative and high-quality work. When you design these environments properly, you can create an incredible learning experience for students.”

The tool, developed in 2012, was made available to all U-M faculty through its LMS earlier this year. Some parts of the gameful learning software are now being used in 58 courses, serving more than 10,000 U-M students. A site license has also been purchased by the University of Arizona.

“We believe gameful is a great way to reconnect students to learning and we’re excited to bring it to a larger audience,” Fishman said.

Making Tech Work in the Classroom

Technology in the classroom can be a distraction or it can be used to enhance students’ classroom experience. Stephanie Cole, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas, Arlington, has chosen the latter.

“Using technology changes not so much student behavior as my behavior,” Cole said in an article for Campus Technology. “It makes me craft lectures so that I can apply information and create questions and quizzes. You’ll be amazed at how it makes you rethink how to get information across.”

Cole uses an active learning platform that combines lecture-capture with student engagement, learner analytics, and content-management tools. The system allows her to lead discussions and field questions in real time, and also makes it possible for students to use their mobile devices to ask questions.

The mobile nature of the platform gives student the option to skip her class and watch lecture videos later, so Cole uses it to take attendance and rewards students for their engagement in the classroom. However, the 24/7 access to the course materials and lectures has led to higher grades.

“Great access to lecture material—that is, being able to hear a lecture that you missed or to listen to all or part of a lecture a second time—offers good students an advantage, especially if English isn’t your first language,” she said. “For those students, or where this course is their first exposure to U.S. and American history, keeping up with the class is easier because they can review the lectures at any time. I see more A’s and B’s from these hard-working students.”

Study Finds Classroom Noise Useful

Some teachers see conversations in the classroom as disruptions that need to stop. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, is using voice-recognition technology to understand if the noise could help teachers gain a better understanding of what’s going on during class.

“I think one of the things we’re noticing is that even if you are incorporating active learning, it’s very easy to focus on the students at the front of the classroom raising their hands, and this data can let teachers know whether they’ve got an equitable spread of participation across the classroom,” Amy Ogan, assistant professor of human-computer interaction at the CMU School of Computer Science, said in an article for eCampus News.

The technology provides instructors with a dashboard that displays classroom activities in different lights. Sensors analyze sounds in the room, not specific conversations. The colored lights give teachers insight into whether they should change or continue their teaching approach.

The technology suggests classroom literature for teachers on ways to better engage students who aren’t participating by sending messages to their phones between classes. Ogan and her colleagues are also working on ways to use cameras to distinguish patterns in the things students do while they are in the classroom.

“We’re working with a university right now with lots of lecturing,” she said. “When the system detects that students haven’t participated in a while, we flash a big red screen on the instructor’s laptop to notify them to incorporate some student interaction.”

Mixed Results from Adaptive-Learning Study

The largest study to date of adaptive-learning software found that results have been modest at best. Nearly 20,000 college students and 300 instructors using the most popular learning software on the market participated in the research, conducted by SRI International for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from 2013-15.

Students were no more likely to pass a course using adaptive-learning tools than in a traditional classroom. Researchers also found that the software by itself isn’t enough and that universities didn’t do a good job of making sure the technology being used actually worked.

The study indicated that the tools functioned better when the instructor used the same language utilized in the software during face-to-face instruction and when student usage was monitored closely. Learning results also improved when the course was redesigned around the software.

“I wouldn’t characterize our report as cynical, just cautious,” Barbara Means, director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, said in an article in The Hechinger Report.  Means was also quick to point out that more and better technology has come to market since the study started in 2013. “It shouldn’t be regarded as though this is the last word. It’s just a very early snapshot.”

Learning App Connects ESL Students

A number of studies have shown that students often learn concepts more quickly and thoroughly when they collaborate and help each other. With that in mind, Canada-based entrepreneur Mark Kim, working with a team of developers, created an app that allows students to tap into a social network as a means of learning English as a second language (ESL).

The new app, dubbed English on the Go, enables instructors to post short lectures from their smartphone or other mobile device. Students then access lectures from their own phones and can archive selected ones into an electronic notebook. Kim is in the process of recruiting instructors from around the world to offer English lessons in their own language, although students can opt for lessons delivered in English.

Users of the app can follow each other to practice everyday English, ask questions, and share their own knowledge and experience—such as how English terminology might vary, depending on the country or region.

The app is intended more for personal improvement than university-level academic study—lectures and user contributions are organized into themes such as food, shopping, and basketball—but it’s not hard to see how a social network available anywhere might help ramp up a student’s language skills more quickly than in-class presentations and practice sessions. The same might work for complex subjects such as mathematics or chemistry.

The copywriter for the English on the Go website might even benefit from using the app for a few lessons. According to the site, the app “is never neatly and professionally defined lectures produced in the studio, which is old-fashioned but it is live, fast reaching and real English lessons delivered by instructors from English speaking countries.”

A Possible Solution for Finding OER

There still appears to be confusion among faculty members when it comes to open educational resources (OER). According to a 2014 Babson Report, 75% of the more than 2,000 faculty members it surveyed said they were unaware of OER, with 67% unable to provide the right explanation of what OER are.

While instructors expressed interest in using OER, finding high-quality resources that fit the goals of the course was an issue. Nearly 60% of the instructors who said they were aware of OER claimed locating appropriate material was a barrier to its use.

“The lack of a catalog and the difficulty of finding what is needed are the most-often-cited barriers,” wrote the authors of the report Opening the Curriculum: Open Educational Resources in U.S. Education. “All three of the most-mentioned barriers are related to the ease of finding appropriate material.”

A solution for finding OER content could be just around the corner. Russ Walker, a former software designer and faculty member at DeVry University-Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, created OER Assistant to “semi-automate” the selection of OER for himself and his colleagues.

Using OER Assistant, instructors are able to copy and paste a learning objective of a course into a form and the software then uses key phrases to search OER repositories, such as Merlot II, OER Commons, and OpenStax CNX. The software then ranks the top possibilities.

It’s still possible the user will have to work through the hundreds of results, but OER Assistant does push to the top rankings used by OER repositories, when available, and key phrases it finds the most often.

“I’ve just pulled together some available resources and put them to a particular task,” Walker said in an article in Campus Technology. “I think this is something that many folks could easily re-create on their own, maybe with their own particular tweak to how it displays the results or what repositories are searched and so on.”

Software Hinders Online Learning

Joanna Cabot has been taking online courses for the last seven years. In a blog post for TeleRead, she claims they haven’t gotten much better over that span.

Her biggest complaint is how the courses are implemented. A check of the gradebook function for her latest online study required a variety of clicks and scrolling, then waiting and more scrolling, before the function was accessed.

“It would be like driving to the grocery store and finding that all of the fruits and vegetables had been taken out of the bins and replaced with paper copies of a map you can use to drive to the farm,” she wrote. “Why on earth would somebody design a forum software this way?”

She also had issues navigating the digital content, the course readings, and library databases that were not integrated into the software.

“I understand that technology is harder to do right than most people think it is,” she concluded. “I understand that there is no perfect system and there will always be bugs and glitches in something like this. I am not saying everything has to be perfect just yet. But it startled me just how little things have improved in all the years I have been taking these courses online. It’s not that we should have progressed to perfection just yet. But we should have progressed a little.”

Limiting Distractions Helps Online Students

Studies have shown that distractions can hinder the success of students in online courses. New research by Richard W. Patterson, a doctoral student at Cornell University, found that software that limits distractions helped students do better and improved course completion.

Patterson’s report, Can Behavioral Tools Improve Online Student Outcomes? Experimental Evidence from a Massive Open Online Course, divided 657 students into three groups and examined how they used the Internet while participating in a nine-week MOOC on statistics.

Each group was assigned a tool that made up the limitation software Patterson used in his research. Students using the commitment tool could set limits on the amount of time they wanted to spend on websites such as Facebook or Twitter. They were also sent an email each morning to adjust the time they spent on the Internet and which blocked individual sites when too much time was spent on them.

The second group used a reminder tool that would just send them a link to the course website after a half hour was spent on other websites. The third group used a focus tool that would ask if they wanted to block distractions and for how long if they wanted uninterrupted time to study.

The commitment tool was the only tool to show significant improvement on student homework submissions, scores, and course completion. Users spent 24% more time on the course and 40% more of them completed it.

Students said spending time on distractions was much less enjoyable when using the commitment tool, because it forced them to unblock sites when they exceeded the time limits they set each morning. It also combined the reminder element and the focus elements into one tool.

“The idea behind the commitment device is that it makes impatient behavior more costly or more difficult, and that’s consistent with the way that students seem to be responding,” Patterson told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The study also showed that distractions bother all students. Patterson expected the software would help the least-prepared students the most, but found that students who were most prepared got the most benefit from it. 

Students Need More from Instruction Software

Adaptive learning products are one of the hotter trends to hit the academic world lately, largely because of their potential to customize instruction to each student’s capabilities and comprehension. That’s easier said than done, according to a new Dutch study published in the Review of Educational Research and reported by the blog Education by the Numbers.

The adaptive function typically kicks in when a student gives a wrong answer in the assessment portion and tries to help the student understand the correct answer, sometimes simply by flagging an erroneous response and inviting the student to pick another. The idea, apparently, is that the student will immediately understand how they goofed.

“But just the opposite is true,” noted the blog’s post. “Simply marking wrong answers was the worst form of feedback.” Some students using this type of software even got lower scores than students without any sort of feedback at all.

Providing the right answer helped students more, the Dutch researchers found, but an even more effective method was offering an explanation or at least some kind of clue that might steer a student toward the correct answer. However, the study determined it was difficult to customize explanations or hints because students may be misunderstanding the material for different reasons.

The study also discovered that adaptive learning software sometimes jumped in with the correct answer or explanation a little too quickly, before the student had time to digest the lesson. When the topic was “something more complicated, students learned more when the feedback was delayed a bit, perhaps until after the student had answered all the questions,” the blog noted.