A New Flipped Learning Assessment
To make sure students are engaging with the content by asking and answering questions, Mazur and his colleagues developed a rubric-based assessment that is based on the quality of responses (annotations must incorporate thoughtful reading and interpretation), as well as how often students comment and whether their comments are posted before the next class meets.
With this rubric, “I get over 20,000 annotations in my class,” Mazur said. “The students write more annotations than the author writes in the actual textbook.” To ensure this doesn’t require extra work for the instructor, Perusall uses a fully automated assessment engine to analyze student postings. “It actually assesses intellectual content, and it does at least as well as a human being” in assessing the quality of these posts over time, he said.
As Mazur was testing the system, “I realized these annotations are like a window into the brains of my students,” he said. “I also realized that if I could read those annotations before class, I could address students’ questions and concerns.” So, he developed a tool for automating this process as well. The system uses sophisticated analytics to generate what he calls a “confusion report” highlighting the top three areas of confusion about a text, complete with a summary of the best student questions.
“This is a great tool for connecting the out-of-class component of flipped learning with the in-class component,” he said.
In testing the system, he found that 70 percent of his students didn’t miss a single reading assignment during the course of the semester—and 95 percent of his students missed no more than one or two chapters. “I think this is as close as we can get to having all students prepared for class,” he said, adding: “Death threats probably wouldn’t work any better.”
Perusall integrates with most learning management systems, and Mazur is working with publishers to make their textbooks available in the system. In the meantime, teachers can upload portions of texts for students to read.
“Education is not just about transferring information,” Mazur concluded. “It’s not about getting students to learn what we know. I want my students to stand on my shoulders, to solve the problems I cannot solve. To do that, active participation and social interaction are a must.”
Dennis Pierce is the former editor of eSchool News who currently writes about education and technology.
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