The BPS research digest recently featured a study that investigated
children's reports of factual and narrative information after a visit to a museum. The children were six years old and, perhaps of no surprise to parents, the children were able to recall a large amount of information. Of particular interest is that they could remember significantly more when they drew at the same time as retelling their trip to the museum. In fact, they were able to remember twice as much factual information when drawing.

Some of the 'drawing' effect was put down to the subconscious verbal encouragement given to children by adults while they were drawing. Drawing could also be acting as a motivator and provide memory clues.

Despite recalling lots of information, the children performed relatively poorly in a traditional comprehension test of 12 questions. One explanation is that the children were interested in different aspects of the same phenomena from adults (something that is known from research elsewhere) and the adults made up the test.

As well as highlighting the value of taking children to museums, there is a strong message in this research in terms of methods for assessing and supporting children's learning.

Gross, J., Hayne, H., & Drury, T. (2009). Drawing facilitates children's reports of factual and narrative information: implications for educational contexts. Applied Cognitive Psychology23(7), 953-971.

Labels: assessment, drawing, education, memory, motivation, museums, schools

Last week I attended a workshop at Hertfordshire University as part of the ESCAPE project (Effecting Sustainable Change in Assessment Practice and Experience). We are working with the project team in developing an Appreciative Inquiry approach to evaluation.

If you've not come across Appreciative Inquiry (AI) before, it's an approach to transformational change that focuses on the positive. It was developed by David Cooperrider in the 1980's, and has seen growing interest more recently. Essentially, "AI is based on the simple assumption that every organisation has something that works well and these strengths can be the starting point for creating positive change" (Appreciative Inquiry Handbook by Cooperrider, Whitney & Stavros, 2008).

Preskill and Catsambas have taken AI and refined it for evaluation purposes. This figure gives an overview of how they see the four stages of AI. The ESCAPE team have already undertaken AI interviews to discover what staff really value. The workshop was an opportunity to continue with the Imagine, and Innovate or Design stages. There were presentations on innovative approaches to teaching and learning, and then staff set about imagining what might be possible for their own courses.

Before the workshop, I had seen this post by AI consulting on how fish bone analysis might be used within the Design stage of AI. This looked like a great way of mapping out what could be done in a quick and visual way. So, I adapted this approach for my session at the ESCAPE workshop. With a goal or "possibility statement" in mind, staff were asked to identify what they have to have in place to make the goal happen. It was suggested that staff use Technology, Processes, People, Materials, Culture, Management, and Support from the ESCAPE team as the 'bones' of the fish.

Here's an example of one of the fish bone posters. I was really impressed with the results!

Some people went on to thinking how these actions could be mapped out in a time line. It was great to see how that acted as a motivator by setting out how positive goals might be achieved in the mid to longer term.

Labels: Appreciative Inquiry, evaluation, HE, JISC, transformational change, visualisation

We provide the evaluation support for JISC's Curriculum Design and Delivery Programmes. (There's an interview with the programme managers in e-Learning Focus, which gives an overview of the background and intent behind these programmes.) As part of that we were recently asked how technology makes a difference to the processes we are focused on. We see technology as vital in our evaluation support role. Zoho Projects is our online project management tool and we use it to do the usual kinds of planning and tracking of tasks. It is also a key part of how we co-ordinate our interactions with project teams - and with 15 Curriculum Delivery and 12 Curriculum Design projects that is vital!

As well as using technology to manage our work, we use it to scan what projects are doing. Project blogs are an excellent source of updates on the thinking behind project developments, and the support team have recently put up Netvibes pages that provide aggregrated feeds for the Delivery projects and Design projects blogs. A great way of finding out what is new, without having to visit every blog individually. Twitter also plays a role, giving more personal insights from individual team members, or just for getting a flavour of what is being discussed within project clusters (#dcb09 is the hashtag Cluster B are using to pinpoint their exchanges). I've been experimenting with Mixero for filtering what is happening on Twitter - great so far! This kind of scanning helps us to keep track of how projects are progressing, suggest evaluation activities they may want to consider at any given time, and to provide evaluation support in an ad-hoc way.

Finally, we are exploring how to provide an interactive mapping of projects' evaluation activities using Web2.0 features. Spicy Nodes, which is a bit like a movable mindmap, is one option. Here's the beginnings of how that might develop, with a sample of Delivery projects.


Watch this space for updates!

Labels: Blog, elearning, evaluation, hashtag, JISC, Project management, Twitter, Web 2.0

In the past week, the issue of the uptake of innovation or technology has arisen in two of our projects - one considering implementation of new LMS in the NHS, and the other at the usage of e-portfolios (and other e-assessment) in Further Education Skills for Work courses.

So, I've been reading round the subject, looking at a variety of models - the most well known probably being Rogers' Innovation Curve (or Technology Adoption Lifecycle), and have just found
"The pencil metaphor". I like this idea, where Lindy McKeown uses the idea of a pencil (and related puns!) to demonstrate ICT uptake in Education. Some aspects of her ideas match up well with Roger's model, particularly at the 'sharp' end!

Labels: adoption, assessment, education, elearning, furthereducation, ICT, innovation, innovationcurve, model, NHS, technology, uptake

Back in March, I attended the JISC 2009 conference, aptly entitled Opening Digital Doors. It was one of those mega events, where you spotted people across the hall, but got caught up in the melee before you could speak to them. That said, I quite liked the informal nature of the drop in demos in the foyer, even managing to find out what QR codes really are, courtesy of Andy Ramsden.

The morning session I sat in on showcased three projects that had trialled very different approaches to using technology to improve student motivation and retention, all under the theme of "Every Learner Counts".

Nicola Whitton described how alternate reality games (ARG) had been used for supporting University student induction, one of the key stages in retaining students. The Argosi project setup urban challenges, and other "purposeful activities" for meeting people and working together, which wasn't necessarily around going to pubs! There was also mention of an ARG framework/toolkit for supporting student induction, which presumably will be released soon.

Hesan Yousif talked about the SPLASH project (student personal learning and social homepages). SPLASH is essentially a social software portal, where academic information is juxtaposed alongside local information and student generated content, with students deciding what they want on their own homepage. Like an iGoogle for students at Sussex. This is an initiative I'd looked at before, as we have done some other work on the potential of web2.0 portals for learners in the NHS. Great to see a working version, and Hesan gave us some interesting anecdotes to how students are using it. He highlighted how blogs had facilitated a sense of community on campus - topics covered experiences of life on campus, student union engagement, politics, photos, etc. He also noted that staff had picked up on the facility, suggesting they might like a similar resource.

Finally, Lucy Stone from Leicester College described the outcomes from the WoLF project (Workbased Learners in Further Education). On the JISC website this is billed as Pocket PCs to support portfolio development by work-based learners in FE, not such a good acronym but perhaps a better description. This project was focused on teaching assistants in early years settings, many with years of experience, but all subject to the strong governmental driver for minimum qualifications for education workers. As they are only in college four hours a week, every minute (as well as every learner) counts. Also key was keeping in contact with learners. Hence learners were given PDAs, and Moodle was set up as a platform for sharing (see the WoLF site, which also contains much of the project outputs, including this literature review of workbased mobile learning). As all students and tutors were new to moodle, there was an induction session. Given the time issue, it was essential that this was purposeful in relation to the course, and those tutors who really engaged with the concept saw this as well as the value of induction. Benefits could be seen in the use of a reflective journal within moodle, which meant that tutors could gauge student skills earlier than the standard model of course submission. This also enabled students to receive rapid feedback very early on in process.

Labels: #jisc09, conference, elearning, FE, HE, induction, mobile learning, Moodle, motivation, retention, web2.0