Patent Application
20080038705
This application claims the benefit of priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application Nos. 60/830,937 and 60/883,416, each of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Embodiments of the invention relate generally to the field of education, and more specifically to the field of delivering educational content, including lessons, to students using technological means.
Educational systems utilizing computers may be used to provide educational content to learners. Such educational content may include multimedia content rich in, e.g. sound, graphics, video, etc. to provide a compelling learning experience. Assessments refer to how such educational systems attempt to determine a learner's mastery of the educational content
Embodiments of the present invention disclose an educational system that delivers educational content/instruction to students in the form of lessons and techniques embodied in the educational system to assess student/learner progress within and between lessons and to deliver appropriate content to students. Advantageously, the educational system maps lessons and lesson content to items in a standards hierarchy, thus providing a snapshot or report showing how the student is doing compared with the standards. Such a snapshot may be produced at any tine. Other embodiments and features of the present invention will become apparent from the detailed description below.
While the appended claims set forth the features of the present invention with particularity, the invention, together with its objects and advantages, will be more readily appreciated from the following detailed description, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings wherein:
In the following description, for purposes of explanation, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the invention. It will be apparent, however to one skilled in the art that the invention can be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, structures and devices are shown in block diagram form only in order to avoid obscuring the invention.
Reference in this specification to “one embodiment” or “an embodiment” means that a particular feature, structure, or characteristic described in connection with the embodiment is included in at least one embodiment of the invention. The appearance of the phrase “in one embodiment” in various places in the specification are not necessarily all referring to the same embodiment, nor are separate or alternative embodiments mutually exclusive of other embodiments. Moreover, various features are described which may be exhibited by some embodiments and not by others. Similarly, various requirements are described which may be requirements for some embodiments but not other embodiments.
Although the following description contains many specifics for the purposes of illustration anyone skilled in the art will appreciate that many variations and/or alterations to said details are within the scope of the present invention. Similarly, although many of the features of the present invention are described in terms of each other, or in conjunction with each other, one skilled in the art will appreciate that many of these features can be provided independently of other features. Accordingly, this description of the invention is set forth without any loss of generality to, and without imposing limitations upon, the invention.
Throughout this description, the present invention will be described using terminology of computers, personal computers, and the internet, along with terminology related to current educational methods and systems. However, one skilled in the art will appreciate that such terminology is intended to be non-limiting.
Broadly, embodiments of the invention disclose an educational system that delivers educational content/instruction to students in the form of lessons, and techniques embodied in the educational system, to assess student/learner progress within and between lessons and to deliver appropriate content to students. It is important to appreciate that a “lesson” refers to a unit of experience and may not be fixed in terms of its definition, size, or complexity in the sense that a “classroom lesson” is fixed. Advantageously, the educational system maps lessons and lesson content to items in a set of standards, thus providing a snapshot or report showing how the student is doing compared with the standards. Such a snapshot may be produced at any time.
Turning now to
In a broad sense, the communications network 1006 represents any network capable of bridging communications between the client system 1002 and the server system 1004. For purposes of the present description, the communications network 1006 is to be understood to include a Wide-Area Network (WAN) in the form of the World Wide Web (WWW) or the Internet as it is commonly referred to. Given that the communications network 1006, in one embodiment includes the Internet, the server system 1004, in one embodiment may comprise a Web server housed in a data center. In one embodiment, the server system 1004 may be implemented as a server farm or server cluster. Such a server farm may be housed in a single data center or in multiple data centers.
At a high-level, the server system 1004 provides educational content in the form of lessons that are executed on the client system 1002. Responsive to the execution of the lessons, the client system 1002 captures a student's responses and transmits same in the form of an input to the educational system 1004 for assessment and lesson sequencing as will be described later.
Focusing now on the server system 1004, it will be seen that the server system 1004 includes as its functional components a student profile database 1012, a standards database 1014, and a lesson database 1016. Additionally, the server system 1004 comprises a student assessment engine 1018, a lesson adapter 1020, and a lesson delivery engine 1022. Hardware that may be used to realize or implement the server system 1004, in accordance with one embodiment of the invention, is illustrated in
In one embodiment, the student profile database 1012 comprises individual student profiles. By way of example, each student profile may comprise personal information such as a student's age, gender, geographic location, interests and hobbies, etc. Learning objectives or goals in the form of minimum standards set by a standards authority, may be resident in the standards database 1014, in accordance with one embodiment. Examples of the standards authority include State and local educational departments. Lessons are stored in the lesson database 1016.
Standards, Assessments, and Requirements
In one embodiment, the educational standards known to the system 1004 are embodied in the form of a hierarchical tree resident in the database 1014. Broadly, the educational standards represent a knowledge taxonomy comprising multiple levels of objectives organized hierarchically or in some other way, for example in accordance with a network or any other topology. An example of such a standards hierarchy is shown in
In one embodiment, the standards hierarchy is stored in and accessed from multiple related tables in a standard Structured Query Language (SQL) database. Other embodiments may use different storage mechanisms.
One embodiment of the present invention relates to a method by which lessons are related to requirements and assessments. Another embodiment of the present invention is the method by which the sequence of lessons is derived from the requirements and assessments,
In other systems, there are a number of ways in which lessons are sequenced including manually and not at all, in which case the student selects the order of the lessons. There are also hybrids in which groups of lessons are sequenced and within those groups, the student selects the order. Such systems also track student process through assessments, allowing the student's progress to be tracked (e.g., in a student profile). Most such assessments track lesson completion only.
In the foregoing, lesson availability was based on micro-objective requirements. However, it is to be appreciated, that in accordance with the techniques of the present invention, lesson and availability may be based on other elements within the knowledge taxonomy such as topics, strands, or objectives. Thus, in accordance u the techniques of the present invention each problem given in each lesson may be attached to one or more particular elements in the knowledge taxonomy, e.g. to a micro-objectives, objective topic, or strand, said elements to be assessed within the lesson. In one embodiment, the attachment of problems to the elements occurs when the lesson is run, not in advance, and it is attached in the context that the problem is given so that even randomly generated problems may be assigned properly.
In one embodiment, each student has a score for each micro-objective which is a percentage of mastery, ranging from 0 to 100%. These scores are fixed at the time the student masters the micro-objective and does not change in the future. Alternate embodiments may revisit such scores and adjust them as students continue to learn.
“Mastery decay” or simply “decay” refers to the extent/rate at which students forget knowledge recently learned. To the extent that “mastery decay” exists, in one embodiment a system 1004 with a sufficient quantity of lessons will automatically take decay into account in follow-up lessons. When decay occurs, a student's scores can go down in a follow-up lesson, possibly forcing them to revisit lessons they previously completed. Such a revisitation would probably be with a higher earn score than the previous time and thus the lesson might appear different to the student because of in-lesson adaptation on.
If a lesson determines that a student's mastery has fallen, this will be reflected in a lowering of the students scores, and the system can automatically move the student to an earlier lesson to help improve their mastery of their relevant micro-objectives.
Alternate embodiments, particularly those that use nano-objectives, may choose to use scores with a different range and may even choose to have only binary values (0 and 1) as scores for their lowest level of objectives. Some alternate embodiments may choose to use score ranges including a range that represents an explicit failure to learn as opposed to a lack of learning. Some embodiments may have specials score values like “don't knows”, and “deemed incapable of learning”.
The micro-objectives may be assessed on any number of criteria, including, but not limited to, time per question, overall time, recent number correct (over a variable number of problems), recent number correct (after adaptation), number correct relative to strength of adaptation, cognitive demand of tasks or problems, a derivative of the speed of answers over time, a derivative of the accuracy of the answers over time. In addition, information for prior interactions or other system-provided information may be used
Partially-Ordered Graph
A unique feature of the present invention is the method used to sequence lessons automatically as a result of the assessments.
At any given time, the student's current profile, containing their current status against all of the micro-objectives, may be combined with the graph in order to determine the exposed surface of the graph, or wavefront, 106 applicable to the student at this time. Lessons that the student is no longer eligible for 120, based on the assessments, are those lessons which are before the wavefront (on the left in the figure). Lessons the student is currently eligible for or will be eligible for in the future 130, again based on the assessments, are after the wavefront (on the right in the figure). Lessons the students is currently eligible for 132 are the future lessons which are on the wave front. These are the lessons (nodes) whose incoming paths (directed edges) cross the wavefront.
Every time an assessment is done (normally at the end of a lesson), a new wavefront can be calculated.
Additional information may be factored into the graph. In particular, information from the student profile may modify the graph of lessons by altering the way in which the assessments and requirements are applied. Note that some embodiments may be capable of making some lessons unreachable when student profile information is filtered in.
It is not necessary to actually build the graph to calculate the wavefront and in some embodiments only the wavefront is directly calculated.
As a further refinement, each requirement and assessment may have associated score ranges, which allows for a better understanding of the student's current knowledge and progress. When the extra information is incorporated into the calculated graph the incoming paths to each lesson more accurately reflects the relationship between lessons and therefore the calculated wavefront more accurately reflects the student's knowledge and which lessons should be available. One embodiment uses this feature of the invention using a score of 0 to 100, plus unrated, for each micro-objective in requirements, assessments, and in the student profile.
Unless the wavefront has progressed to the end of the available lessons, the student will always have at least one, and possibly many, lessons available. Offering too many lessons to a student may be undesirable, so another feature of the present invention is limiting the list of available lessons that are presented to the student. Priority is given to those lessons for which the student's profile ranks them highest. This list is then limited by a total number of lessons to be presented, based on a limiting factor. In one embodiment, the limiting factor may be age, with younger kids receiving fewer choices and older kids receiving more choices. In some cases, the limiting factor may be any factor (e.g. the student's learning style) by which students may be clustered or classified into groups. Where there are still too many lessons to present, based on equivalents priorities, a subset selection method is used. In one embodiment, a round robin method is used as the subset selection method, so that the user sees different lessons on each subsequent presentation. One skilled in the art would appreciate that a number of alternative ranking methods might be used to select the subset of lessons to present to the student.
In one embodiment the system 1004 may also choose a single lesson for the student, in several situations. In one ease a single lesson ranks so much higher than all other lessons that it becomes the single lesson to be presented. In another case, the student may have just completed a lesson and the system has seen a high degree of success in following that lesson with another particular lesson.
When the system chooses a particular single lesson for a student, it may skip the normal user interface presented for choosing lessons and may seamlessly switch from one lesson to the next.
Although automatic sequencing is very powerful, there may be times when a specific sequence is needed, such as to comply u a particular standard. Therefore, another feature of the present invention is to allow for manually-specified sequencing.
In one sense lessons delivered by the system 1004 may be considered to be both instruction and assessment at the same time. In other systems, educational content is divided into instruction and examination, with instruction providing information to the student and exanimation testing the student's knowledge. These systems may present examinations as games or fun activities, but the effect is the same. In contrast, the system 1004 of the present invention uses lessons which interweave instruction and assessment. In accordance with the techniques disclosed above, an assessment algorithm is continuously assessing a student, and instructional information provided to a student is adapted based on the assessment of the student. In one embodiment, the instructional information may be provided in the context of a particular problem given to the student during a lesson. In some cases, the lesson may take the form of a game that the student plays. However, even in such cases, the assessment algorithm constantly assesses the students and adapts instructional information presented to the student while the student plays the game. The assessment algorithm may be configured to assess and reevaluate the student periodically, say after every problem.
Reporting
Reporting allows a student or parent to know where they are in making progress toward their educational goals. The standards hierarchy of the present invention allows for a more flexible report to be generated.
Each level within the standards hierarchy may have a function attached to it, which is used to calculate a score for that item. In addition, each node in the standards hierarchy may optionally have an alternate function attached to it, which substitutes for the generic function for that level or it may have alternate functions attached to it which apply to lower levels in the standards hierarchy.
In one embodiment, the default functions for score calculation at all levels other than the lowest level are a class of formulas:
score average=(values)*(kˆ average(logk(each value/average(values)))
and
score average=(values)*(logk(average(kˆ(each value/average(values))
The actual formulas and the constant value k are tuned over time.
Other embodiments may use other default functions including but not limited to a simple percentage value, or a weighted computation over the lower level scores.
State and Local Standards and Requirements
Although the present invention provides for the specification of a set of standards, as described above, there are many differing standards in use. In the United States alone, there are standards in each of the fifty states. Parents naturally want their student's progress reported to them in a manner that is relevant to the state and/or other local standards they are expected to meet. A feature of the invention provides for this, by allowing each item in the standards hierarchy to be optionally mapped to a plurality of each local standards in each set of state standards provided for in the system.
Given such a mapping, a report or summary can be generated of a student profile or of the delta of a student profile which shows the students knowledge and/or progress in terms of such local standards. Note that it is possible for a local standard to be unmapped to a system standard and vice versa. Such cases can be noted in a report.
The local standards mapping just described does not affect the student profile or the partially-ordered graph or calculated wavefront discussed previously—it affects reporting only. However, some state standards may require certain topics to be taught n a particular order. Therefore, another feature of the invention is to allow(w) for the specification of state standard-specific manually-specified ordering, allowing for lesson ordering to be modified for a particular local standard.
In addition to local standards mapping, it is possible for a local standard to add additional micro-objectives that do not map to any globally available micro objective. Such a local micro-objective might be desired, for example, for state-specific knowledge taught in a course such as history. Lessons which teach the appropriate information also need to be added to the system and matched against Such a micro objective.
In addition, local standards may specify alternate score evaluation functions, as described above, which apply only when a given local standard applies.
In some embodiments, instead of mapping micro-objectives to standards in a set of standards that may be state, local or third-party standards, it is possible to provide reports on the micro-objectives themselves. This can be done by providing a report on the micro-objectives as mapped to the standards, but allowing reports on the micro-objectives to be viewed without the mapping. In some cases, a parameter may, be set to control whether reporting occurs at the micro-objective level or at the standards level.
Mapping to Standardized Tests
The standards mapping and ordering described above can be applied in another novel way, to standardized tests such, as the SAT, PSAT, ACT, ITBS, or Washington State's WASL. Using such standards mapping, a report can be generated which shows how a student is performing against what is expected of them for a standardized test. And test-specific manually-specified ordering can be used to modify lesson ordering to better fit the requirements for such a test.
Note that the mappings for such tests are not the examinations themselves, but rather a mapping to the knowledge that a student must master (as represented by micro-objectives) in order to pass the test.
In one embodiment, a Standardized Test Predictor may be built as part, of the reporting for a standardized test. A Standardized Test Predictor is an algorithm that computes a synthetic score for a standardized test for a student based upon the student's mastery of the required objectives for the test. Such a predictor for the SAT, for example, would allow a report to compute an instantaneous estimate of a student's actual SAT score at any time.
In one embodiment, the quality of the projection of such scores may be improved by confidentially collecting the real test scores after the fact, or, perhaps, acquiring it from a testing authority.
In another embodiment, the system could replace a standardized test and provide an equivalent score. A typical student spends many hours using the systems, in contrast to very few hours spent taking a standardized test. Thus, a test result from the system is both more accurate and more detailed than the result from a standardized test can be.
Processing Assessments and Proposing Lessons
Otherwise, in step 1116, a proposed value for the assessment is calculated using the rule. Next, the subprocess ends in step 1118 and the loop motives to the next applicable assessment rule. After subprocess 1110 has evaluated all rules, step 1130 performs a number of substeps for each micro-objective assessed by the lesson. In step 1132, the highest calculated proposed value is chosen from among all of the proposed values from step 1110, and, in step 1134, this value is submitted to the server. The subprocess ends in step 1136 and the loop moves to the next applicable micro objective. After subprocess 1130 has processed all of the micro-objectives, step 1150 submits a request to the server for the next possible lessons.
For example, using the processes in
In contrast to
Next the student completes lesson D, the same second lesson as in 13A, but here the student is given a choice of A, E, and G.
The hardware 1400 also typically receives a number of inputs and outputs for communicating information externally. For interface with a user or operator, the hardware 1400 may include one or more user input devices 1406 (e.g., a keyboard, a mouse, heart rate monitor, camera, etc.) and a output devices 1408 (e.g., a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) panel, a sound playback device (speaker), a haptic device, e.g. in the form of a braille output device).
For additional storage, the hardware 1400 may also include one or more mass storage devices 1410, e.g., a floppy or other removable disk drive, a hard disk drive, a Direct Access Storage Device (DASD), an optical drive (e.g. a Compact Disk (CD) drive, a Digital Versatile Disk (DVD) drive, etc.) and/or a tape drive, among others. Furthermore, the hardware 70 may include an interface with one or more networks 1412 (e.g., a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), a wireless network and/or the Internet among others) to permit the communication of information with other computers coupled to the networks. It should be appreciated that the hardware 1400 typically includes suitable analog and/or digital interfaces between the processor 1402 and each of the components 1404, 1406, 1408, and 1412 as is well known in the art.
The hardware 1400 operates under the control of an operating system 1414, and executes various computer software applications, components, programs, objects, modules, etc. to implement the techniques described above. Moreover, various applications, components, programs, objects, etc., collectively indicated by reference 1416 in
In general, the routines executed to implement the embodiments of the invention may be implemented as part of an operating system or a specific application, component, program, object, module or sequence of instructions referred to as “computer programs.” The computer programs typically comprise one or more instructions set at various times in various memory and storage devices in a computer, and that, when read and executed by one or more processors in a computer, cause the computer to perform operations necessary to execute elements involving the various aspects of the invention. Moreover, while the invention has been described in the context of fully functioning computers and computer systems those skilled in the art will appreciate that the various embodiments of the invention are capable of being distributed as a program product in a variety of forms, and that the invention applies equally regardless of the particular type of computer-readable media used to actually effect the distribution. Examples of computer-readable media include but are not limited to recordable type media such as volatile and non-volatile memory devices, floppy and other removable disks, hard disk drives, optical disks (e.g., Compact Disk Read-Only Memory (CD ROMS), Digital Versatile Disks, (DVDs), etc.), among others, and transmission type media such as digital and analog communication links.
While certain exemplary embodiments have been described and shown in the accompanying drawings, it is to be understood that such embodiments are merely illustrative and not restrictive of the broad invention and that this invention is not limited to the specific constructions and arrangements shown and described, since various other modifications may occur to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon studying this disclosure. In an area of technology such as this, where growth is fast and further advancements are easily foreseen, the disclosed embodiments may be readily modifiable in arrangement and detail as facilitated by enabling technological advancements without departing from the principals of the present disclosure.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60883416 | Jan 2007 | US | |
| 60830937 | Jul 2006 | US |
