2. Problem
• Curriculum based measures
– Brief and frequent assessments to monitor
children’s performance
– Taking a child’s academic ‘temperature’
• Many teachers use CBM to monitor their
students’ literacy and math skills
• Assessments are time consuming and tedious
for teachers to score and record
3. Example: Grading essays
• Students are given a story starter and write for
3-5 minutes
• Teachers score every word-pair and record
Correct – Incorrect in a grade book
• Students repeat task every 2-4 weeks
4. Sample student passage
I want to buy new clotes. I love buy any more. I
love money. My family love get money. My
family love get lot of money. My family love
work job. I want work job.
6. Your task
• Design a system to improve the experience
• Possible outcomes
– Reduced grading time
– Improved decision making by aggregating data
• You have 30 minutes to design a solution
– Outline the goals of your system
– Rough visual design of key interface(s)
– Each group will have up to 5 minutes to present
– What improvement do you anticipate?
7. WordMark Demo
• Version 1
– Delivered on CD
– Issues
• Version 2 requirements and limitations
– http://lt.umn.edu/dhh
– Teachers’ computers!
• 1024 x 768
• Must allow re-scoring
• Must allow ‘natural’ navigation
• Enhancements
– Centralized data collection
– Spell checking
– Improved scoring interface
– Improved visualizations
8. Research
• What questions should we ask/ data should
we collect?
– To improve writing assessment
– To improve writing instruction
– To improve the design
