Tölvumál - 01.11.2011, Blaðsíða 17

T Ö LV U M Á L | 1 71 7 | T Ö LV U M Á L
Finger on the pulse
– in the now and for the future
In Iceland students go through answering questions for the National standard tests
and the PISA survey. All the 10th graders are tested on academic achievement
as well as surveyed for attitude and behaviour at the end of the school year. This
means getting all the students to sit in a classroom all day long and take a long
standardized paper survey. These surveys cover page after page of questions
ranging from self-esteem to study behaviour to risk behaviour to health to computer
use and many other psychometric tests. There are other examples in Iceland of
such broad sweeping surveys. The outcome is tallied, ranked and sent back to
the schools from months and up to 2 years later in a paper report. Only then do
problems within the school life appear, long after the students have left sometimes
for summer vacation, but many have moved on to college.
In software and industry, we don’t go and build, manufacture and ship objects,
only to test them later on. Instead we have unit tests, regression tests, integration
tests, quality checks and other practices to minimize bad things from shipping.
That is the ideal model we want to bring into education. A continual monitoring
of just a sample of the population each time, as a representative part of the
whole school, looking for any issues and quickly allowing people to respond and
administer a change immediately, when change is due - not after several months
or even years.
Instead of surveying an entire school once a year, wouldn’t it be better to
continually evaluate the school throughout the school year, a few students at a
time? With some basic statistical methods, it’s possible to gather data from a
small sample group. What if we look into taking many of the key aspects that
make start-up culture so fertile, the ideas of rapid development, tight feedback
loops, and always adjusting agile processes and apply them to a school
environment?
Skólapúlsinn is an online software survey system introduced in Iceland in 2008.
We are a team of three coming from different backgrounds; psychological
measurement, computer science and educational research. By bringing some
computer science into social science, we’ve managed to merge the ideas of
these two disciplines in our product, bringing about a fundamental change in the
way school administrations works with their school development.
Since the beginning, Skólapúlsinn has surveyed over 12,000 students
anonymously in over 70 compulsory schools, age 11-15, getting their opinions
about various topics in the classroom, about their wellbeing, interactions with
other students, engagement with their studies and staff relations. Instead of
testing an entire school once, the system randomly selects a small representative
sample of the school, balanced for gender and age. These 40 students are like
a micro-version of the school and their answers, within statistical certainty,
represent the school as a whole. This is done every month of the 9 month school
year, giving the school a definitive pulse.
A school is a living organism, growing and changing. It needs care, attention and
sometimes to be brought back inline when problems arise. The idea behind a
rapid, short, monthly testing cycle is that if there is a problem in October, it can be
quickly addressed even before the second semester starts. In subsequent months,
as interventions are introduced, the change in target attitudes or behaviour is
observed to evaluate long-lasting effects and programs for improvement are re-
evaluated, making sure that the programs stay effective.
Having a pulse monitor allows schools to quickly and easily compare themselves
to all the other, anonymously, in near real-time. At the end of each test month, the
results are calculated both for each school and for all schools participating as a
whole. These results are released within days of the end deadline, not months or
years later. This allows schools to get in and instantly compare themselves to the
nation as well as seeing themselves improve.
Lets take bullying, for instance, a school certainly has a general feeling if there
are problems or not, but unless they have spent time at other schools, they have
no idea what is normal. They might assume that a few kids getting teased here
and there is what it’s like in all schools. Our system can quickly alert them and
let them know that, perhaps no, that it is actually above the average rate. The
principal can step in and setup stricter guidelines and continue to follow it up and
see if things are getting better.
Our system is a custom web-based survey tool, written in PHP, backed by a
mySQL database. By using open-source tools, we have been able to achieve
massive jumps that the previous generation wasn’t able too. By skipping paper
tests, we get much quicker results (the only reason it isn’t real-time is to protect
anonymity). We can also look for much more advanced answering patterns than
is available on paper. What if a student completes a page of the survey in 2
seconds? It is obvious to us they didn’t even read the questions, but using paper,
no one would know and these faulty results are tabulated, skewing the results.
By time-stamping everything we not only avoid these problems, but find new
underlying trends.
Using the the web, building on free open-source software, borrowing new
business practices like Agile, thinking of a school not as an institution, but a living
organism and putting a laser focus on helping schools improve their environment,
nothing like this has been built or could have been built before. Now, a small
team can set about making a difference by introducing something new and
innovating into academics.
Skólapúlsinn isn’t a tool for some top-down management of our national
education system. This is a tool for schools to improve the school life of our
nations students. Today’s students are the next generation of Iceland’s workforce,
brainpower and future. Giving them the best possible education, guidance
and track today improves the opportunities we all have in the future. As the
famous saying goes “A rising tide lifts all boats”. Spending time now improving
the lives of today’s children, improves everyone’s life in the future. Much like
the tide coming in, education assessment is used to monitor and improve the
opportunities for our children. “Lifting the boats”, by improving our children’s
education and the environment in which they learn, everyone comes along for the
ride making society better.
Today our survey software tests psychometric balance, but in the future
technology will play and ever increasing role in how our children are taught and
learn.
Brian Suda,
The idea behind a rapid, short, monthly testing cycle is
that if there is a problem in October, it can be quickly
addressed even before the second semester starts.
Spending time now improving the lives of today’s
children, improves everyone’s life in the future.