Planning Grant: Engineering Tools for Education Research (EnTER)

Tufts University, Medford MA

Investigators

Abstract

The proposing team envisions an Engineering Research Center that will transform learning and instruction with a focus on active learning in STEM education. Current efforts to understand what takes place in such environments are limited to choosing between studies using compact, simple forms of data (such as grades or surveys), and studies employing video and written records of students' work. Compact data provide insight but are removed from the classroom setting, while detailed record reviews are small-scale because of the labor-intensive methods required to analyze these rich, qualitative data. The compromises associated with both strategies have severely limited progress in developing a scientific understanding of the classroom environment and using this information to impact real-world classrooms. Radically altering the way educational environments foster learning requires a multi-pronged approach bringing together researchers with expertise in cognitive and learning sciences, bio-sensing, data analytics and computer systems. The resulting engineered system will address fundamental research questions concerning how students learn best as individuals, in teams, and in classroom communities. This knowledge can subsequently be translated into practical tools to provide instructors with in-classroom insight into students' thinking and engagement in active learning environments at scale. This ERC planning grant will facilitate the development of a team and Center structure that the National Academies of Science and Engineering believe is necessary to Advance Personalized Learning in the next century. Knowledge developed through these tools will, in an inclusive and ethically sensitive manner, lead to advances in curriculum, pedagogy, and the design of engineered systems in support of learning and instruction. Active learning environments with multiple concurrent conversations and activities are a challenge to study; however, understanding their dynamics is central to the advancement of learning science. Our engineering team will invent new sensors, embedded in low-power wearable computing platforms, whose data will be processed by next-generation machine learning algorithms. The ERC planning grant will bring together researchers in convergent disciplines through workshops and data hackathons to understand the research problems and demonstrate potential technologies. These instrumented learning environments will allow researchers to formulate and evaluate the hypotheses rapidly and at a scale well beyond that which can be achieved today. The ERC planning team will directly engage a range of stakeholders with an interest in the education of the next generation workforce. These stakeholders include students, educators, researchers, administrators, industry and accreditation agencies that will be engaged to build an ecosystem around the proposed center. Given the nature of the effort, privacy and ethical treatment of human subjects will be central to all aspects of the project. The hackathons and workshop activities will impact the broader research community beyond Tufts University by showing the potential of these technologies for educational research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.