Hello Marcia and team! This is fascinating work. I would love to know more about so many aspects of it. For instance, would you say more about how this web-based system helps students consider their peers' ideas?

Welcome to our video! As we embark on this project, we are grappling with many open questions. For example, multiple ideas (both normative and alternative) are often detected in a student explanation. These alternative ideas typically represent thoughtful effort from the student. With this in mind, we wonder:

1. Which idea should the thought buddy respond to?
2. Which serves as a more productive starting point?
3. How do we design guidance that confers respect and encourages reflection?

 

We welcome your insight into these questions and any other comments or questions you have for our team!  

 

I love this idea and want to try it!  Like any good program or idea, this takes time. What would you say that the teachers gave up to spend more time on this process?  Do they feel it was a good trade off?  

Hi Marcia and team!  I loved hearing the students say they didn't have to worry about "being wrong."  It seems the thought buddy removes some of the peer pressure students face in the classroom.  Following up on Mike's question, many teachers feel they face conflicting challenges of "covering the material" and taking the time of take advantage of students' individual ideas.   I wonder if your teacher participants expressed that concern.

Hi Mike and David, 

thanks for your interest and this important question. Teachers I worked with definitely expressed the concern not being able to cover the material - when trying to let students explore more, bringing in students' ideas, letting students revise, etc. With respect to the dialog, teachers really appreciated that each student was able to discuss with the avatar and that each student got unique feedback, something they could not have done in the time the chat took. I have seen teachers weave in students' ideas to jump-start a class discussion, it did not take long at all :). We hope that the dialog makes many ideas visible, placing them for being taken up beyond the chat and working with teachers to find ways in which students' ideas can become central to instruction and ways in which these ideas can help to "cover the material". 

This is so cool, y'all!  I have so many thoughts bubbling up.  As someone who deeply values responsive teaching -- particularly responsive teaching that attends closely to the *substance* of students' thinking -- I've been somewhat skeptical of NLP because it feels like it can miss some of the depth and connections within student ideas.  BUT some folks on our team just did an analysis of student responses using SLP and found that with a little bit of additional work on the part of analysts (looking at some of the top example responses), they could identify many of the same patterns that another team of researchers did without NLP.  So in this case, NLP was a really helpful tool. 

I'm processing out loud a bit, but I'm curious about the trade-offs you see along the lines of being able to discern and respond to substance...  And we'd love to chat with you offline sometime.  We share a deep value in framing students' ideas as generative and finding ways to build from there.

I think this type of tool has a lot of potential for some students.  And every different "tool" for engaging and promoting student reflection and thinking is helpful for teachers.  The fact that students can "ask anything" and not worry about what the teacher might think is one of the benefits I can see for this.  Nothing should totally replace the "human" interaction, but I can see this enhancing learning and teaching and allow for teacher's time to be used in the ways that are most effective for each different student.  And I think there are clear trade-offs, but each additional venue we provide is a plus.  Thanks for this work!

Hi Ann, 

thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us! I speak for our entire team when I say I absolutely agree with you that no technology should replace the teacher, nor would it ever be able to do that. We are working closely with teachers to learn how these tools best support them in their practice and to refine the tools we design such that we can maximize their value for practice. The potential of such tools might be that they help us scale what effective teachers do anyways. When teachers are facing many demands on different levels of teaching, such tools might help them provide the support to their students they would like to. 

Best, 

Sarah

Hi Ann, thanks for keeping the conversation going! Yes, teachers can see the entire dialog students had with the avatar in their WISE teacher tools view. They can see the initial explanation, the adaptive feedback from the avatar and the student's response + how they revised their explanation. It does take time to go through the chats for all your students. I have seen a teacher look at some of them to get a better sense of how students are thinking about the science between class periods or at the end of the school day. It's kinda fun reading through. Other teachers looked at what specific students had said to see if these students needed guidance or not. Yet another teacher printed the chats and used them for discussion in the class! We're also thinking about using these chats during PD when teachers have time to really dive in and explore their students' ideas. But, as you're saying, it does take time!