NEWS at Concord Consortium

CC’s Open Source Contributions

Schools have a wide range of devices— from desktops to handhelds. To have the broadest impact, educational software should run on all of them. In addition to creating and using open source software, Concord Consortium staff have contributed improvements to existing open source projects in order to achieve the goal of ubiquitous software.

Nearly all Concord Consortium’s interactive activities are written with Java. Some activities work with sensors, so we need ways of communicating with those sensors from Java. Many sensors use serial ports for this communication. Dima Markman contributed to the RXTX project, so Java applications could use serial ports on OS X.

Our interactive Java components use a graphical framework called Swing, but Swing-based Java components are currently not as portable as they could be. Scott Cytacki is contributing to the SwingWT project, so our models can be used more widely.

For instance, Palm handhelds can run Java applications, but Swing is not supported. SwingWT allows Swing applications to run on the Palm. Java applications can run on the newer Windows operating systems, including Pocket PC handhelds, without separately installing Java. This mode of running Java applications relies on SwingWT to display Swing-based components. Finally, SwingWT allows for the integration of Swing-based components into Eclipse, which provides a rich authoring environment.

Getting our software into the hands of teachers and students requires a huge group effort; we’re proud to be part of the open source community.

Performance Assessment Project

In May, we will start on an exciting threeyear project to demonstrate the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of computer-assisted performance assessment for evaluating student knowledge and ability in advanced technological education. With the support of the Advanced Technological Education Program of the National Science Foundation, we will develop, field-test, validate, and disseminate automated analyses of students’ understanding of key topics in introductory electronics, based on their performance on relevant tasks. The analyses will be used as formative assessments for the teacher, as well as feedback to the students themselves. We expect that this project will lay the groundwork for large-scale implementation of this style of assessment in technical high schools and two-year colleges around the country.

Performance assessments, which go beyond the memorization and snap responses required by multiple-choice questions and closely resemble the challenges offered by the workplace, are widely recognized as the preferred way to assess students’ understanding and skills, particularly in technical areas. They offer students problems with ambiguous questions, multiple steps to a solution, and often more than one satisfactory (and no optimal) outcome. Implementation of performance assessment has been limited because it is expensive, labor-intensive, and subjective. We will combine software and probeware in a computer-based approach that can offer the same advantages as typical performance-based assessments at a fraction of the cost, while also providing a more objective outcome.