Supervisor: Clare Wallace and Sam Fearn
Research area: Education
Project level: 4th year
It is often said that one of the best ways to gain a deep understanding of a topic is to teach it to somebody else. In this project, we will apply this maxim to higher level mathematics, discussing the design of automated assessment materials suitable for other students to use to help them learn the material. We will use a topic drawn from one of your third- or fourth-year modules as a focal point.
Automated assessment is a powerful teaching tool, enabling learners to test their own understanding without requiring an external marker. This allows students to get feedback at a pace that would be infeasible without the use of such tools. This in turn allows for students to immediately test whether they have understood the feedback and hence better understood the material – this is sometimes known as closing the feedback loop. This style of assessment is known as formative assessment (or assessment for learning), as opposed to summative assessment (or assessment of learning). However, producing automated assessments can be challenging, requiring both the pedagogical skills to know what sorts of errors to check for and what feedback to give, as well as the technical skills to produce an assessment capable of checking for these errors.
In this project we will use a tool called STACK, which in turn uses a computer algebra system known as Maxima, in order to assess students’ answers to the questions we design, and to produce feedback which the students can then use to help develop their knowledge. We will consider what makes for an effective formative assessment, as well as how to provide useful feedback to a student – pedagogical skills which are important in teaching, beyond producing automated assessments.
We will also discuss different methods used in scholarship to evaluate our own teaching. Feedback from students, observations of how they interact with their assessments, and data collected by learning and assessment platforms can all help to inform us and to develop our teaching.
Students taking this project will learn about how STACK questions are written, conduct a small independent scholarship project, and produce an assignment that incorporates the results of their enquiries.
Examples of these scholarship projects could include evaluating responses to an existing STACK question; surveying students about their study habits; or conducting a focus group or structured observation/interview.
The first part of this project will be based on learning how to write STACK questions and reading research papers with a focus on pedagogical literature concerning higher mathematics.
In the second part, students will learn how to conduct pedagogical research, organise their own small project, and interpret their results.
Students will evidence their understanding by discussing theories and/or examples from the literature studied; conducting robust independent pedagogical research; and designing an assessment that incorporate considerations from both the literature and their own scholarship projects.
This understanding will be demonstrated through clear exposition and explanations in the written report, poster, and presentation.
This project will involve spending quite a lot of time writing code in Maxima, as well as working with html and LaTeX. You don’t need to know any Maxima to start with, but you should be prepared to learn it.
You might like to look into some of the following papers: