Every month teachers face the dilemma of what exercises should their students practice, and what ... more Every month teachers face the dilemma of what exercises should their students practice, and what their consequences are on long-term learning. Since teachers prefer to pose their own exercises, this generates a large number of questions, each one attempted by a small number of students. Thus, we couldn’t use models based on big data such as deep learning. Instead, we developed a simple to understand state-space model that predicts end-of-year national test scores. We used 2,386 online fourth-grade mathematic questions designed by teachers and each attempted by some of the 500 students in 24 low socioeconomic schools. We found that the state-space model predictions improved month-by-month and that in most months it outperformed linear regression models. Moreover, the state-space estimator provides for each month a direct mechanism to simulate different practice strategies and compute their impact on the end-of-year standardized national test. We built iso-impact curves based on two c...
Education is critical for improving energy efficiency and reducing CO2 concentration, but collabo... more Education is critical for improving energy efficiency and reducing CO2 concentration, but collaboration between countries is also critical. It is a global problem in which we cannot isolate ourselves. Our students must learn to collaborate in seeking solutions together with others from other countries. Thus, the research question of this study is whether interactive cross-border science classes with energy experiments are feasible and can increase awareness of energy efficiency among middle school students. We designed and tested an interactive cross-border class between Chilean and Peruvian eighth-grade classes. The classes were synchronously connected and all students did experiments and answered open-ended questions on an online platform. Some of the questions were designed to check conceptual understanding whereas others asked for suggestions of how to develop their economies while keeping CO2 air concentration at acceptable levels. In real time, the teacher reviewed the student...
In this paper we explore the impact of an inter-classrooms math tournament implemented through in... more In this paper we explore the impact of an inter-classrooms math tournament implemented through internet. The strategy is to increase learning through intra-classroom collaboration generated by inter-classroom competition. Ten fourth grade classes with all their students from eight schools participated. During previous weeks students practiced on-line and played a cloud based board game designed to learn word problems. Afterwards, all students participated on an inter-classroom tournament. They played on-line synchronously during 60 min. The game was played in dyads formed from different schools. The list of each classroom average score was published every 5 min on each student computer. We found an important social facilitation effect: a significant improvement on the performance of male students weak on math, and therefore a reduction on the performance gap between mathematically weak and strong male students. The improvement of female students weak on math was also significant but lower
In this paper we explore the impact of an inter-classrooms math tournament implemented through in... more In this paper we explore the impact of an inter-classrooms math tournament implemented through internet. The strategy is to increase learning through intra-classroom collaboration generated by inter-classroom competition. Ten fourth grade classes with all their students from eight schools participated. During previous weeks students practiced on-line and played a cloud based board game designed to learn word problems. Afterwards, all students participated on an inter-classroom tournament. They played on-line synchronously during 60 min. The game was played in dyads formed from different schools. The list of each classroom average score was published every 5 min on each student computer. We found an important social facilitation effect: a significant improvement on the performance of male students weak on math, and therefore a reduction on the performance gap between mathematically weak and strong male students. The improvement of female students weak on math was also significant but lower.
2021 XVI Latin American Conference on Learning Technologies (LACLO), 2021
The importance of classroom observation as a tool to improve the quality of education has motivat... more The importance of classroom observation as a tool to improve the quality of education has motivated the use of Machine Learning methods for automatic detection of classroom activities. However, most of these efforts require expensive sensors to register video and/or audio signals from lessons or do not follow a validated observation protocol. In contrast, in this work we present a cost-effective, easy to use, non-intrusive scalable method designed for the needs and practical conditions of teachers. We recorded teacher’s talk relying only on a smartphone with a budget lavalier microphone and followed a validated observation protocol: the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS). Using teachers’ talk transcriptions of 41 fourth grade lessons, we trained Machine Learning models to recognize three collapsed categories from COPUS’ teacher dimension throughout a lesson (Presenting, Guiding, and Administration). In particular, we propose a deep network model which outperformed a powerful model like BERT for this task. With this method we contribute with a useful tool to provide fast and effective feedback for teachers, as well as the possibility for researchers to quickly analyze in a thoughtful way a large amount of lessons.
Proceedings of the Singapore National Academy of Science
Many of the computational models in science, engineering, and social studies are agent-based mode... more Many of the computational models in science, engineering, and social studies are agent-based models. However, despite their growing importance and potential attractiveness to students, agent-based models are not taught in elementary, middle or high school. In this paper, the author explores the feasibility of teaching agent-based models to elementary and middle school students, and the extent students can learn modeling using agent-based mathematical and computational models.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Classrooms are very well suited for research on social interactions in the wild. Hundreds of hour... more Classrooms are very well suited for research on social interactions in the wild. Hundreds of hours of student interactions are rapidly accumulated. In this paper we analyze two months of video recordings from a fourth grade class, where the teacher and a sample of 3 students selected each day wore a mini video camera mounted on eyeglasses. The data reveals different gaze patterns between groups according to gender, subject, student grade point average, sociometric scale and time of day. The patterns that were found demonstrate the promising power of first-person video recordings for understanding social interaction in the classroom.
Every month, teachers face the dilemma of what exercises their students should practice, and what... more Every month, teachers face the dilemma of what exercises their students should practice, and what their consequences are regarding long-term learning. Since teachers prefer to pose their own exercises, this generates a large number of questions, each one attempted by a small number of students. Thus, we could not use models based on big data, such as deep learning. Instead, we developed a simple-to-understand state-space model that predicts end-of-year national test scores. We used 2386 online fourth-grade mathematics questions designed by teachers, each attempted by some of the 500 students in 24 low socioeconomic schools. We found that the state-space model predictions improved month by month and that in most months, it outperformed linear regression models. Moreover, the state-space estimator provides for each month a direct mechanism to simulate different practice strategies and compute their impact on the end-of-year standardized national test. We built iso-impact curves based ...
Advanced Computational Methods for Knowledge Engineering, 2017
We present the results from a 90-min session in which 196 fourth grade students from 13 classes f... more We present the results from a 90-min session in which 196 fourth grade students from 13 classes from 11 schools performed a series of engaging, hands-on activities. These four activities were designed to help students understand how rockets fly. During the activities, students use skateboards, toy cars, springs, balls, and water rockets to model the physics behind a rocket launch and predict the proportion of water that will lead to maximum elevation. A subset of the classes took a post-test involving 22 basic physics questions, presented in the form of a 60-min online synchronous interschool tournament. The other subset of classes also answered the same questions online in sixty minutes, though in this case they were not presented as a tournament. The students who participated in the tournament improved significantly more than the rest. Moreover, students with weak academic performance who participated in the tournament improved the most, reducing the gap with the academically stronger students. Lessons involving hands-on experiments using skateboards, toy cars and water rockets are already highly engaging. However, this experience shows that using technology to connect schools synchronously through an online tournament is a powerful mechanism for boosting student engagement and learning in core science concepts. Furthermore, we compared learning outcomes with a previous year face-to-face interschool tournament. With the online synchronous interschool tournament, students learned twice as much as they did with the face-to-face interschool tournament.
European Science Education Research Association Conference, 2019
In the field of science education, content analysis is a popular way to analyse collaborative inq... more In the field of science education, content analysis is a popular way to analyse collaborative inquiry-based learning (CIBL) processes. However, content analysis is time-consuming when conducted by humans. In this paper, we introduce an automatic content analysis method to identify the different inquiry-based learning (IBL) phases from authentic student face-to-face discussions. We illustrate the potential of automatic content analysis by comparing the results of manual content analysis (conducted by humans) and automatic content analysis (conducted by computers). Both the manual and automatic content analyses were based on manual transcriptions of 11 groups’ CIBL processes. Two researchers performed the manual content analysis, in which each utterance of the groups’ discussions was coded to an IBL phase. First, an algorithm was trained with some of the manually coded utterances to prepare the automatic content analysis. Second, the researchers tested the ability of the algorithm to automatically code the utterances that were not used in the training. The algorithm was a linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Since the input of the SVM must be a numerical vector of constant size, we used a topic model to build a feature vector representation for each utterance. The correspondence of the manual and automatic content analyses was 52.9%. The precision of the classifier varied from 49% to 68%, depending on the IBL phase. We discuss issues to consider in the future when improving automatic content analysis methods. We also highlight the potential benefits of automatic content analysis from the viewpoint of science teachers and science education researcherspeerReviewe
We propose a method that automatically describes teacher talk. The method allows us to describe a... more We propose a method that automatically describes teacher talk. The method allows us to describe and compare classroom lessons, as well as visualizing changes in teacher discourse throughout the course of a lesson. The proposed method uses a machine learning model to infer topics from school textbooks. Certain topics are related to different contents (e.g. kinematics, solar system, electricity), while others are related to different teaching functions (e.g. explanations, questions, numerical exercises). To describe teacher talk, the machine learning method measures the appearance of the inferred topics throughout each lesson. We apply the proposed method to a collection of transcripts from physics lessons, as well as discussing the potentialities of integrating the proposed method with other kinds of automatic and manual classroom lesson descriptions.
Sustained improvement in student achievement on national standardized tests for low socio economi... more Sustained improvement in student achievement on national standardized tests for low socio economic status (SES) districts is critical for reducing gaps in educational inequality. We report the results of 3 years of implementation of an ICT web-based learning environment in all 11 public schools of a low SES urban district in Chile. This includes 43 fourth grade classes and 1,355 students. This is a Computer Aided Instruction program that promotes whole class collaborative learning with peer support. Effect size on the national standardized fourth grade math test is 0.33, which is three times the national improvement level over the same period and five times the improvement made by a neighboring district with a similar population. On the other hand, the same students did not make any improvements on the national standardized language test. Since each class was taught by the same teacher, only without ICT, we can therefore discount the teacher effect.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
COVID-19 has been extremely difficult to control. The lack of understanding of key aspects of pan... more COVID-19 has been extremely difficult to control. The lack of understanding of key aspects of pandemics has affected virus transmission. On the other hand, there is a demand to incorporate computational thinking (CT) in the curricula with applications in STEM. However, there are still no exemplars in the curriculum that apply CT to real-world problems such as controlling a pandemic or other similar global crises. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing exemplars of CT for modeling the pandemic. We designed exemplars following the three pillars of the framework for CT from the Inclusive Mathematics for Sustainability in a Digital Economy (InMside) project by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC): algorithmic thinking, computational modeling, and machine learning. For each pillar, we designed a progressive sequence of activities that covers from elementary to high school. In an experimental study with elementary and middle school students from 2 schools of high vulnerability, ...
New Skills in the changing World of Statistics Education IASE Roundtable Conference
This paper aims to characterize the thinking processes needed for the practice of statistics with... more This paper aims to characterize the thinking processes needed for the practice of statistics with big data and data analytics platforms driven by artificial intelligence. Such thinking has evolved from a traditional question-then-answer analysis to a more creative approach, which starts with data-first answers from examining opportunistic data, and then works backward to find the questions that should have been asked. Concerned with the rare use of the latter approach at school level, the authors developed a six-phase framework for the statistical thinking needed for the practice of statistics in a technologically- and data-rich world, in the context of the APEC-funded project “Inclusive Mathematics for Sustainability in a Digital Economy” (InMside). An exemplar related to a sustainability issue is provided to briefly illustrate the framework implementation.
Every month teachers face the dilemma of what exercises should their students practice, and what ... more Every month teachers face the dilemma of what exercises should their students practice, and what their consequences are on long-term learning. Since teachers prefer to pose their own exercises, this generates a large number of questions, each one attempted by a small number of students. Thus, we couldn’t use models based on big data such as deep learning. Instead, we developed a simple to understand state-space model that predicts end-of-year national test scores. We used 2,386 online fourth-grade mathematic questions designed by teachers and each attempted by some of the 500 students in 24 low socioeconomic schools. We found that the state-space model predictions improved month-by-month and that in most months it outperformed linear regression models. Moreover, the state-space estimator provides for each month a direct mechanism to simulate different practice strategies and compute their impact on the end-of-year standardized national test. We built iso-impact curves based on two c...
Education is critical for improving energy efficiency and reducing CO2 concentration, but collabo... more Education is critical for improving energy efficiency and reducing CO2 concentration, but collaboration between countries is also critical. It is a global problem in which we cannot isolate ourselves. Our students must learn to collaborate in seeking solutions together with others from other countries. Thus, the research question of this study is whether interactive cross-border science classes with energy experiments are feasible and can increase awareness of energy efficiency among middle school students. We designed and tested an interactive cross-border class between Chilean and Peruvian eighth-grade classes. The classes were synchronously connected and all students did experiments and answered open-ended questions on an online platform. Some of the questions were designed to check conceptual understanding whereas others asked for suggestions of how to develop their economies while keeping CO2 air concentration at acceptable levels. In real time, the teacher reviewed the student...
In this paper we explore the impact of an inter-classrooms math tournament implemented through in... more In this paper we explore the impact of an inter-classrooms math tournament implemented through internet. The strategy is to increase learning through intra-classroom collaboration generated by inter-classroom competition. Ten fourth grade classes with all their students from eight schools participated. During previous weeks students practiced on-line and played a cloud based board game designed to learn word problems. Afterwards, all students participated on an inter-classroom tournament. They played on-line synchronously during 60 min. The game was played in dyads formed from different schools. The list of each classroom average score was published every 5 min on each student computer. We found an important social facilitation effect: a significant improvement on the performance of male students weak on math, and therefore a reduction on the performance gap between mathematically weak and strong male students. The improvement of female students weak on math was also significant but lower
In this paper we explore the impact of an inter-classrooms math tournament implemented through in... more In this paper we explore the impact of an inter-classrooms math tournament implemented through internet. The strategy is to increase learning through intra-classroom collaboration generated by inter-classroom competition. Ten fourth grade classes with all their students from eight schools participated. During previous weeks students practiced on-line and played a cloud based board game designed to learn word problems. Afterwards, all students participated on an inter-classroom tournament. They played on-line synchronously during 60 min. The game was played in dyads formed from different schools. The list of each classroom average score was published every 5 min on each student computer. We found an important social facilitation effect: a significant improvement on the performance of male students weak on math, and therefore a reduction on the performance gap between mathematically weak and strong male students. The improvement of female students weak on math was also significant but lower.
2021 XVI Latin American Conference on Learning Technologies (LACLO), 2021
The importance of classroom observation as a tool to improve the quality of education has motivat... more The importance of classroom observation as a tool to improve the quality of education has motivated the use of Machine Learning methods for automatic detection of classroom activities. However, most of these efforts require expensive sensors to register video and/or audio signals from lessons or do not follow a validated observation protocol. In contrast, in this work we present a cost-effective, easy to use, non-intrusive scalable method designed for the needs and practical conditions of teachers. We recorded teacher’s talk relying only on a smartphone with a budget lavalier microphone and followed a validated observation protocol: the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS). Using teachers’ talk transcriptions of 41 fourth grade lessons, we trained Machine Learning models to recognize three collapsed categories from COPUS’ teacher dimension throughout a lesson (Presenting, Guiding, and Administration). In particular, we propose a deep network model which outperformed a powerful model like BERT for this task. With this method we contribute with a useful tool to provide fast and effective feedback for teachers, as well as the possibility for researchers to quickly analyze in a thoughtful way a large amount of lessons.
Proceedings of the Singapore National Academy of Science
Many of the computational models in science, engineering, and social studies are agent-based mode... more Many of the computational models in science, engineering, and social studies are agent-based models. However, despite their growing importance and potential attractiveness to students, agent-based models are not taught in elementary, middle or high school. In this paper, the author explores the feasibility of teaching agent-based models to elementary and middle school students, and the extent students can learn modeling using agent-based mathematical and computational models.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Classrooms are very well suited for research on social interactions in the wild. Hundreds of hour... more Classrooms are very well suited for research on social interactions in the wild. Hundreds of hours of student interactions are rapidly accumulated. In this paper we analyze two months of video recordings from a fourth grade class, where the teacher and a sample of 3 students selected each day wore a mini video camera mounted on eyeglasses. The data reveals different gaze patterns between groups according to gender, subject, student grade point average, sociometric scale and time of day. The patterns that were found demonstrate the promising power of first-person video recordings for understanding social interaction in the classroom.
Every month, teachers face the dilemma of what exercises their students should practice, and what... more Every month, teachers face the dilemma of what exercises their students should practice, and what their consequences are regarding long-term learning. Since teachers prefer to pose their own exercises, this generates a large number of questions, each one attempted by a small number of students. Thus, we could not use models based on big data, such as deep learning. Instead, we developed a simple-to-understand state-space model that predicts end-of-year national test scores. We used 2386 online fourth-grade mathematics questions designed by teachers, each attempted by some of the 500 students in 24 low socioeconomic schools. We found that the state-space model predictions improved month by month and that in most months, it outperformed linear regression models. Moreover, the state-space estimator provides for each month a direct mechanism to simulate different practice strategies and compute their impact on the end-of-year standardized national test. We built iso-impact curves based ...
Advanced Computational Methods for Knowledge Engineering, 2017
We present the results from a 90-min session in which 196 fourth grade students from 13 classes f... more We present the results from a 90-min session in which 196 fourth grade students from 13 classes from 11 schools performed a series of engaging, hands-on activities. These four activities were designed to help students understand how rockets fly. During the activities, students use skateboards, toy cars, springs, balls, and water rockets to model the physics behind a rocket launch and predict the proportion of water that will lead to maximum elevation. A subset of the classes took a post-test involving 22 basic physics questions, presented in the form of a 60-min online synchronous interschool tournament. The other subset of classes also answered the same questions online in sixty minutes, though in this case they were not presented as a tournament. The students who participated in the tournament improved significantly more than the rest. Moreover, students with weak academic performance who participated in the tournament improved the most, reducing the gap with the academically stronger students. Lessons involving hands-on experiments using skateboards, toy cars and water rockets are already highly engaging. However, this experience shows that using technology to connect schools synchronously through an online tournament is a powerful mechanism for boosting student engagement and learning in core science concepts. Furthermore, we compared learning outcomes with a previous year face-to-face interschool tournament. With the online synchronous interschool tournament, students learned twice as much as they did with the face-to-face interschool tournament.
European Science Education Research Association Conference, 2019
In the field of science education, content analysis is a popular way to analyse collaborative inq... more In the field of science education, content analysis is a popular way to analyse collaborative inquiry-based learning (CIBL) processes. However, content analysis is time-consuming when conducted by humans. In this paper, we introduce an automatic content analysis method to identify the different inquiry-based learning (IBL) phases from authentic student face-to-face discussions. We illustrate the potential of automatic content analysis by comparing the results of manual content analysis (conducted by humans) and automatic content analysis (conducted by computers). Both the manual and automatic content analyses were based on manual transcriptions of 11 groups’ CIBL processes. Two researchers performed the manual content analysis, in which each utterance of the groups’ discussions was coded to an IBL phase. First, an algorithm was trained with some of the manually coded utterances to prepare the automatic content analysis. Second, the researchers tested the ability of the algorithm to automatically code the utterances that were not used in the training. The algorithm was a linear support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Since the input of the SVM must be a numerical vector of constant size, we used a topic model to build a feature vector representation for each utterance. The correspondence of the manual and automatic content analyses was 52.9%. The precision of the classifier varied from 49% to 68%, depending on the IBL phase. We discuss issues to consider in the future when improving automatic content analysis methods. We also highlight the potential benefits of automatic content analysis from the viewpoint of science teachers and science education researcherspeerReviewe
We propose a method that automatically describes teacher talk. The method allows us to describe a... more We propose a method that automatically describes teacher talk. The method allows us to describe and compare classroom lessons, as well as visualizing changes in teacher discourse throughout the course of a lesson. The proposed method uses a machine learning model to infer topics from school textbooks. Certain topics are related to different contents (e.g. kinematics, solar system, electricity), while others are related to different teaching functions (e.g. explanations, questions, numerical exercises). To describe teacher talk, the machine learning method measures the appearance of the inferred topics throughout each lesson. We apply the proposed method to a collection of transcripts from physics lessons, as well as discussing the potentialities of integrating the proposed method with other kinds of automatic and manual classroom lesson descriptions.
Sustained improvement in student achievement on national standardized tests for low socio economi... more Sustained improvement in student achievement on national standardized tests for low socio economic status (SES) districts is critical for reducing gaps in educational inequality. We report the results of 3 years of implementation of an ICT web-based learning environment in all 11 public schools of a low SES urban district in Chile. This includes 43 fourth grade classes and 1,355 students. This is a Computer Aided Instruction program that promotes whole class collaborative learning with peer support. Effect size on the national standardized fourth grade math test is 0.33, which is three times the national improvement level over the same period and five times the improvement made by a neighboring district with a similar population. On the other hand, the same students did not make any improvements on the national standardized language test. Since each class was taught by the same teacher, only without ICT, we can therefore discount the teacher effect.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021
COVID-19 has been extremely difficult to control. The lack of understanding of key aspects of pan... more COVID-19 has been extremely difficult to control. The lack of understanding of key aspects of pandemics has affected virus transmission. On the other hand, there is a demand to incorporate computational thinking (CT) in the curricula with applications in STEM. However, there are still no exemplars in the curriculum that apply CT to real-world problems such as controlling a pandemic or other similar global crises. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing exemplars of CT for modeling the pandemic. We designed exemplars following the three pillars of the framework for CT from the Inclusive Mathematics for Sustainability in a Digital Economy (InMside) project by Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC): algorithmic thinking, computational modeling, and machine learning. For each pillar, we designed a progressive sequence of activities that covers from elementary to high school. In an experimental study with elementary and middle school students from 2 schools of high vulnerability, ...
New Skills in the changing World of Statistics Education IASE Roundtable Conference
This paper aims to characterize the thinking processes needed for the practice of statistics with... more This paper aims to characterize the thinking processes needed for the practice of statistics with big data and data analytics platforms driven by artificial intelligence. Such thinking has evolved from a traditional question-then-answer analysis to a more creative approach, which starts with data-first answers from examining opportunistic data, and then works backward to find the questions that should have been asked. Concerned with the rare use of the latter approach at school level, the authors developed a six-phase framework for the statistical thinking needed for the practice of statistics in a technologically- and data-rich world, in the context of the APEC-funded project “Inclusive Mathematics for Sustainability in a Digital Economy” (InMside). An exemplar related to a sustainability issue is provided to briefly illustrate the framework implementation.
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