Doris B. Chin

Assessing Whether Students Seek Constructive Criticism: The Design of an Automated Feedback System for a Graphic Design Task

We introduce a choice-based assessment strategy that measures students’ choices to seek constructive feedback and to revise their work. We present the feedback system of a game we designed to assess whether students choose positive or negative feedback and choose to revise their posters in the context of a poster design task, where they learn graphic design principles from feedback. We then describe an empirical study that sampled one hundred and six students from a US middle school to evaluate the feedback system. We make the following contributions: (1) describe the design and implementation of a novel feedback system embedded in an assessment game, Posterlet, (2) outline an approach to analyze graphic design principles automatically to provide contextual feedback in a novel poster design domain, (3) show that choices to seek negative feedback and to revise correlate with in-game performance, and most importantly, (4) show that choices correlate with in-school achievement: the choice to revise correlated with both in-school performance measures (Science and Mathematics grades), while the choice to seek negative feedback correlated with students’ prior standardized scores in Mathematics.

Applying cognitive developmental psychology to middle school physics learning: The rule assessment method

Cognitive developmental psychology often describes children’s growing qualitative understanding of the physical world. Physics educators may be able to use the relevant methods to advantage for characterizing changes in students’ qualitative reasoning. Siegler developed the “rule assessment” method for characterizing levels of qualitative understanding for two factor situations (e.g., volume and mass for density). The method assigns children to rule levels that correspond to the degree they notice and coordinate the two factors. Here, we provide a brief tutorial plus a demonstration of how we have used this method to evaluate instructional outcomes with middle-school students who learned about torque, projectile motion, and collisions using different instructional methods with simulations.