Teaching Strategy R&D
UX Research・Education・Cognitive Behavior・Digital Teaching Material
Overview
This was the experiment project of my graduate thesis for IT Application at NCNU in Taiwan. In close collaboration with a class composed of five secondary school students with learning difficulties in math, the project aimed to leverage the key factors of learning motivation to improve learning performance. The final outcome was a 4-phase teaching strategy design conducted by a series of teaching activities, which also explored a bigger picture of learning problems for my thesis.
Role
User research, UX design
Timeline
Feb 2018 − Jun 2018
Outcome
Interactive prototype
Design Problem
How might we help students improve math learning experience through finding the stumbling block?
Scope definition
Role defining
There were multiple roles involved in the learning system with users. To systematically structure the design thinking process, I first concerned about my role with others and their actions. By defining three primary roles involved in this project, the math teacher who also represents the client in this case, students, and researcher, I set out to see how we could react to each other.
My role, as the researcher, focused on leveraging the teaching strategy into the engagement loop, meanwhile collaborating with the remedial courses conducted by the math teacher.
Design Process
The design process mainly consisted of two phases, the research and design strategic, which can be illustrated in the following graph. Minimalist, simple, professionalism, high quality.
Research methods
Literature reviews
My first step into research helped me to understand what remedial education and game-based teaching are, how they are developed, and why so many schools and individuals adopted it. This gave me insights on my research objective, the workflow, and the obstacles in the current education system.
Observations
My understanding towards user behaviors was built on the findings through observations of in-class activities and after-class studying. This helped me more precisely outline the whole learning process and the emotion flow on the user journey map. Based on it, I was able to highlight the pain points from user’s mindset and their coherent reactions, and identify a more concise direction for solution.
Cognitive analysis
To learn more about the characteristics of users and their attitude toward math learning experience, I decided to conduct a cognitive analysis and a series of interviews. I spoke to the math teacher and each of user to collect and classify the various factors that influence their learning experience.
Key findings
In this case, the current remedial education can’t serve its purpose.
During learning period, the motivation improvement usually comes before the performance improvement and then forms as a cycle.
Knowledge-conflicting occurs when users begin to understand the concept of new knowledge.
The current learning process is not a knowledge building process.
・・・Research
Persona development
Based on the information and one-on-one interviews with users, I synthesized my insight into one persona owing to the similarity of the conditions and goals among them were extremely high. The primary persona consists of the common characteristics of five users who
Doesn’t know what exactly they don’t understand in their current math learning
Enjoys and benefits from more guidance and encouragement during self practicing process
Doesn’t know what the value of math learning is.
How did users think & feel ?
According to the result of survey, the cognitive analysis indicated the relatively insignificant influential dimensions, “active learning strategies”, “performance goal“, and “math learning value“, were the factors that users less considered to be the stimulus for math learning. These dimensions corresponded with the persona’s needs as well as revealed the goals.
This gave me an idea that the solution may be taken on from the dimensions that performs lower scores(the red ones w/ degree <=3) with the assistance of others that holds higher scores(the orange-tagged & green-tagged w/ degree>3).
How did users learn?
Combined with the learning mental model, the current learning process can be divided into six phases in two modes. The mode was defined by how students took action during math learning. The passive mode is basically lecture-taking; on the other hand, the active mode refers to practice.
My focus, the active mode, starts from the mode switching point to the end of knowledge construction.
During the observation process of in-class learning and after-class studying, I tried to record users’ decisive actions and their emotion changes on all the touch points over time. The emotional turning points, especially the unsatisfied ones, are where the pain points exist, namely, where the opportunities lie.
Forming a solution
Teaching strategy
The teaching strategy is in line with the idea of motivation and performance reciprocity, and it’s designed to be a motivation trigger which would get involved in the current learning process through four phases:
Error rectification,
Confidence accumulation,
Value finding,
Learning habit changing.
Each phase is embedded with a couple of motivation factors(as tags shown in the graph ) that would be mainly enhanced.
Wireframing
The implementation of the teaching strategy, with users' feedback added in synchronously, the whole experiment process was carried out through a target-reaching and edutaining game, the Possible Mission, whose difficulty level is matched with users’ learning curve at current level.
In order to evaluate the effect of edutainment both on traditional tools and digital device that are attention-caching and fresh to users, the activities design branched into two types of teaching style that depends on the teaching materials.
Hand-drawn wireframe
Prototyping
1. Error rectification
Wireframe - Algebra shopping board
Hand-coded digital prototype
The teaching topic was simultaneous linear equations. In order to help students solve the problem of knowledge conflicting , I designed two exercises for students to review basic knowledge of algebra and other basic equation calculation concept.
Landing the page from a mission description, students could see no test-like question at the beginning. With an idea of designing an easy understanding interface combined with real-life experience, I ended up building a simple game board to display context questions along with a few buttons for students to answer and adjust the board setting.
The page is browser-based and built with an open-source framework typically used for building UI and SPA, Vue.js, which is a decent fit for this light simple interactive webpage. (source code)
2. Confidence accumulation
Wireframe - Simplified word problems
Paper prototype - Simplified word problems with highlighted clues
The phase is confidence accumulation, which is a strategy of confidence building by successful experience creating.
According to the result of the last activity as well as in a long period of observation by the class math teacher, having strong self-doubt and self-abnegation in learning math happens in its major case of facing long-descriptive word problems. This exercise iss therefore designed for improving word math problems comprehension.
Through simplified word problems, students could therefore highlight and find the clues hidden in the description of math problems. Along with guidance and encouragement during class, students feel more comfortable to make mistakes and retry.
3. Value finding
Wireframe - An interactive Cartesian coordinate board
Hand-coded interactive Cartesian coordinate board
Learning math without knowing the value of math learning has been a tough issue for the client. Actually knowing the value of math learning for a 13-year-old student may not be an easy understanding concept. I came up with an idea to help from another perspective — find it fun. The simple coordinate board allowed students to enter equations and see lines immediately.
Conducting with a puzzle game and context math problems, students had to draw the lines somewhere before they submitted their input. After submitting, students would gain a point as their lines corresponded with the equations. Overall, they felt it more fun with responses as “I learn math because it’s fun.“
The webpage is built with Vue.js as well as D3.js that mainly for generating and displaying the dynamic coordinate plane. (source code)
4. Learning habit changing
Wireframe - An rewarded math contest
Paper prototype - A rewarded math contest
Learning by teaching. In this phase, I designed a rewarded contest to elicit students to try things that they seldom did —— collaboration. Students chose their team members and work together to solve all the given math problems.
They could gain more scores by helping other teams that couldn’t solve problems. In order to earn more scores and win, they acted more willingly to “teach” on the withe board and pointed out the errors.
・・・
The result
The current learning process has been altered.
The result represents the teaching strategy effect in the engagement loop according to some observed facts:
More actively engaging in class activities;
Less dread of question asking both in-class and after-class;
More performance-chasing during math learning.
the altered learning process
The user learning experience modestly raised by the learning process transformation, which is a switching process from test-passing-purposed to knowledge-building-oriented. It can be illustrated as the above graph. Reviewing it from a researcher’s view, action changing from phase four to phase six differentiated the result.
To mark the changed actions on the user journey map again, new opportunities could be found.
Insights
Through the teaching strategy, finding three factors that trap users in inefficient math learning:
1. Shaky domain foundation;
2. Self-doubts;
3. Inertia recluse learning pattern.
Furthermore, each of them can be separately ameliorated through proper knowledge rectification, successful experience creating and environment stimulation. From the viewpoint of users for learning experience, it’s an interaction of motivation and performance. From a math teacher’s point of view, back to the core of education, it’s always a teaching strategy iteration.
・・・
