XplanaZine

Session 3
Friday 1:30 - 2:45
Session — The Learning Record Online
Presenter — Margaret Syverson, University of Texas at Austin

• http://www.cwri.utexas.edu/~syverson/oir
• http://lro.cwrl.utexas.edu

- LRO - project for documenting student’s learning
- background: British inner-city schools ran up against problems of evaluating students - students are diverse, teachers are creative, methods vary, content changes, … Teachers were unhappy with standardized testing; research into new ways of evaluating, work informed by Britton, Vykotsky,
Langer, Gardner, Kohn - goal: to evaluate what students were producing in the natural course of their schoolwork
- ideas transplanted in California, worked out a process for doing large-scale evaluations (2 teachers discussing learning records, outside readers needing to reach agreement)
- student’s learning records as a process for professional development - sharpening and calibrating teacher’s judgments based on authentic student work
- Syverson went from Center for Language and Learning in California (?) as a grad student, where high school learning records were administered, to Texas, where she began to develop a college learning structure that can be delivered online
- structure of student learning records: demographics; Part A interviews w/ parents, and their own reflections; formal and informal evidence (observations of class activity, looking for trends over time; work samples,can identify where the actual sample is located, online or offline) - interested in development over time; Part B framework for self-analysis (Vygotsky’s 5 dimensions of learning - confidence, skills, knowledge, experience, reflectiveness; course strands and goals) at midterm and end of semester, linking interpretations to their evidence; Part C matching interpretive analysis to grade criteria, makes clear to say to student that grade estimate reflects learning as shown in the learning record or not
- learning record - organizer for a portfolio, rather than a portfolio itself - doesn’t require a certain pedagogy or class structure; but doesn’t work well with classes where the only thing produced is a big end of semester project, and in big classes need TAs to help because they have to
respond to student’s work
- tech guts: developed with in-house and grant funding, also some fee-based services to support it; committed to open source, so developed in MySQL and PHP; browser-based, and beginning to support XML for data, particularly to port data through stylesheets for accessibility and language questions, plus templating
- designed used model-view-controller model of programming: the database model, the view, and the controls are separate and modular so that you can replace one piece without having to reconfigure the others - lends to adaptability and easy troubleshooting, attractive to other institutions who
may want to use it
- integration of application: “unforeseen happy consequences” - good support for research (data gathering tool for data in context); ongoing sampling; comparisons across populations
- scalable as an assessment tool: can see individual view of students, but also how the teacher’s classroom is going, and also departments and course programs
- model is reliable, authentic (coming right from the classroom), validated, flexible with respect to the teachers’ practices - opening the class to new and mixed assignments, even for the same project, encourages experimentation, rich feedback for both student and teacher processes
- activity is the unit of analysis: has the student engaged wholeheartedly in the activity?
- moderation process is public, so it expands people’s understanding of the expertise that teachers bring to the table
- vertical model: starts with learning record, also supports teacher portfolios, institutional records - all of which share the same structure, and can also be integrated to sample student work at the institutional level, for example
- implementation: used heavily in k-12 in California, and now by Bureau of Indian Affairs; now being implemented across disciplines; used as the writing assessment for U Texas at Dallas; longitudinal implementation to track how students do across time (grade level); at the organizational level, it’s phased in to encourage more buy-in - gets built “by association,
not mandate”; coaching is provided, often by other teachers, plus support communities of practice and online support; in their classes, it replaces one major project
- initiative to create archives of student work that was distributed across institutions, working with the Information School to create a leaner, faster, customizable search across projects; working with issues of privacy, control, security, consistency, working with multimedia; thinking about a peer-to-peer model of distribution; tremendous resource for sampling data across disciplines, time
- Audience Question: longevity? Can people export stuff and take it with them? Answer: Up to the institution to decide, but still working with a lot of implementation issues so they haven’t had a practical implementation yet; the students own all of the media, which then get linked from the learning record - which raises issues, because if t hey go away, the files go away; thinking about doing file upload, which raises other questions though
- AQ: what gets folded in? things that aren’t associated with a course, such as internships, service learning? Answer: right now tied to classes, but that’s a great idea, should be able to work with the model; also, might be a good thing for someone else to build in (open source)
- AQ: have you found resistance from people who don’t want others to be able to see their work? Answer: we have a clear privacy policy that states when and where and how it will be shared; she encourages her students to post only things that they wouldn’t mind sharing with a class; there’s a checkbox to opt out of sharing with certain people; students really like having the opportunity to describe their learning and reflect on their learning; interestingly, she’s only had 2 grade complaints over 9 years, that both turned into a teachable moment - also key, stripping away a judgment from the grade
- looking for evidence of learning, rather than evidence of mistakes; turns teachers into allies rather than the bad guy, changes the nature of the relationship completely
- AQ: mechanism for getting it into the open source community? Answer: right now just wrapping up the code, getting it to where other people can deal with it, particularly those who don’t have a lot of money or expertise
- AQ: who’s your accreditation? Have you talked to the accreditation people for Texas? Answer: not yet, but the LRO provides specific, concrete data
- AQ: when do teachers comment on students work? Answer: as it’s produced, with comments, not rades
- a robust model of assessing learning that has at its heart teaching and learning, not what can we do with a computer