Volume 7, No. 2, Fall 2003

Contents | Two Revolutions | Monday's Lesson | Ready to Teach | CC Portal | PDF Version

The Concord Consortium Portal

Making student performance reports available

Imagine that you’re a science teacher and someone is trying to sell you a new piece of educational software. After pointing out how powerful the software is, how flexible the interface, how compelling the graphics, the salesman adds, “Of course, you won’t be able to tell what your students are doing with this program, since there are far too many students for you to observe them all carefully. The program doesn’t record what they’re doing either, so you won’t be able to use it to figure out whether they’ve learned anything.”

Unfortunate as that sounds, that is exactly what we have been telling teachers for years: Just put the technology in front of the kids. If you want to know what they’re doing, give them worksheets to fill out; if you want to know what they’ve learned, give them a paper and pencil test.

Why don’t educational computer programs routinely keep track of what students are doing and produce high level, descriptive reports that can guide both student and teacher? In short, it’s difficult!

In order to keep track of what a student has done, the software must first know who the student is, and while schools do maintain student information on computers, that information is not readily available to instructional applications. Moreover, few schools are set up to store and maintain large databases of student performance data, much less execute sophisticated analyses of that data for assessment purposes.

Enter the Concord Consortium Portal. Over the past couple of years, mainly under the auspices of our Modeling Across the Curriculum (MAC) project, we have developed technology that will give teachers, students, parents, and administrators access to a wealth of data related to students’ learning. We will use this rich data source to assess deep conceptual understanding of a domain far more effectively than previous methods allowed. We currently are working on ways to analyze all these data in order to deliver informative reports that can give teachers an instant “snapshot” of how a class or a particular student is progressing. As we collect more and more information from classrooms across the country, our software also will enable educators to compare the performance of students within their own school, as well as between schools. (In order to guarantee the security and confidentiality of the information we gather, we do not use names to identify students; instead, we assign each student a unique identification number, and we encrypt individual students’ names so that they can be read only by school personnel and the students themselves.)

When students use software in the CC Portal, information is uploaded to our server in the form of log files, which are automatically parsed and inserted into a global database. Authorized students, teachers, and administrators can request any of a set of pre-defined reports. As we continue our research, our analysis of these data will become more sophisticated. The reports will become more insightful and useful to students as well as to teachers. Eventually, we envision an interface that will enable users to obtain customized reports.

The CC Portal grew out of the data collection and analysis requirements of the MAC project, but it will serve many projects and be an important part of the Education Accelerator (see page 11). Several Concord Consortium projects, sponsored by the Department of Education and by the National Science Foundation, are developing interactive curriculum materials in the form of structured activities based on manipulable models. This technology, which promises to deliver radical improvements in the teaching of math and science, also uses the CC Portal to generate detailed descriptions of students’ interactions with the models.

The Internet has made it easy for us to collect detailed data from students using sophisticated applications in many classrooms simultaneously. The Concord Consortium Portal makes it easy for schools to participate in educational research of global importance.

Paul Horwitz (paul@concord.org) directs the Concord Consortium Modeling Center.

Article Links & Notes

Modeling Across the Curriculum — http://mac.concord.org

Download software, access the CC Portal to view reports

Point your browser to http://mac.concord.org. On your first visit, you will need to register as a member. After registering, join the Concord Consortium Demo School and download the Modeling Across the Curriculum software to try out the activities. After completing an activity, login to the CC Portal and view student reports. You can freely download the software for your use at home or at school. To use the software effectively with many students and teachers in a school, you should enroll your school in the Portal and specify an administrator. The administrator has the authority to register additional teachers, classes and students directly or to delegate the responsibility by creating custom Express Registration codes. Whenever your students run an Accelerator activity, the software will track not only their answers to specific questions, but also the strategies they use to investigate the model: how long they take, which choices they make, whether their investigations appear focused or erratic, the number of times they ask for help, and how they react to that help. You can see reports based on these data. Please let us know what you think of these reports and how we could improve them.

The projects described in this newsletter are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Noyce Foundation and others. All opinions, findings, and recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies. Mention of trade names, commercial products or organizations does not imply endorsement.

All Contents Copyright © 2005 The Concord Consortium. All rights reserved.