Teacher & Student Control Study
One of the biggest problems between K12 teachers and students is how they deal with their relationships, especially when it comes to the amount of control they want to have within a classroom. While traditionally, teachers are dominant in controlling everything from classroom management to course schedules, but with the emergence of various tools, this approach may no longer suffice for students. In this research, using participatory speed dating, we wanted to understand teachers’ and students’ opinions on methods for distributing control between themselves during the collaboration process when using our cognitive tool, APTA, to create new solutions for a better learning experience.
Duration
Fall 2022 - Spring 2023
Research Type
Explorative & Iterative Research
Context & Research Focus
Our problem:
One of the key points found in the previous study was that teachers and students have different preferences on the level of control when using the system (the majority of the students (59%) wished they could have chosen their partner, 33% reported “Maybe”, and 8% reported “No”).
How to resolve the conflict between teacher and students’ preferred level of control?
Our Tool: In this study, we explored the challenges and solutions in the context of
dynamic transitioning (in which collaboration and individual learning transition on an individual level) using our cognitive tutoring tool called
APTA (adaptive peer tutoring system). In this system, students can be assigned by the teachers as tutors and solvers to work together, or they can work on their own questions.
Click to read our previous paper. 
Approach & Process
Understanding the task: what do we need to learn
We first conducted a round of literature review to learn “Teachers & Students control / relationship” and “student autonomy” to understand what are some potential directions and design space.
We also analyzed our current user journey as well as teacher-student interaction to identify possible needs & solution for each stage.After learning some background information and our current tool about how teachers and students work with each other in class, we reframed our focus into:
Research Goal:
Understand teachers’ and students’ opinions on methods for distributing control between teachers and students during the collaboration process
Design motivation:
- To ensure both student autonomy and teacher autonomy in the student collaboration process to improve their motivation, experience, and performance in collaboration
- To ensure the teacher-student control still result in a smooth pairing/collaboration process
Brainstorming Ideas: How might we solve challenges?
Knowing that we want to learn teachers’ and students’ opinions on methods for distributing control, we decided to make use participatory speed dating, which can help us to test various ideas quickly and summarize teachers’ and students’ preferences.
1. For each stage in the collaboration journey, we ideated various ideas to distribute control.
2. Organized ideas according to teacher-student control spectrum using colors
3. Categorized & Synthesized them into different challenges
4. Choose the specific ideas for participatory speed dating
Participatory Speed Dating: What are their ideas & opinions?
The reasons for us to choose PSD were that:
- it was easier to solicit opinions and deeper thoughts when presented with scenarios
- Evaluate all the challenges and methods (a lot to ask!) with in a short period of time
- Researcher might be limited - generate new ideas from the users’ sides on the methods
The session were split into two phase: participatory design and idea evaluation. We recruited 2 teachers & 3 students for phase 1 and 15 teachers & 10 students for phase 2, all from middle school and high school based on our network connection.
In the evaluation phase, we collected both qualitative data (interviews) and quantitative data (rankings).
Here is an example for how it worked!
Participatory Speed Dating: What are their ideas & opinions?
Here is a high level summary of what we found
Before Collaboration:
- Student want teacher-dominance or balanced control at the stage of preparing for the students, whereas teachers prefer high teach control
During Collaboration:
- Students prefer teachers to dominant collaboration timing, partner, and content to prevent students from making wrong decisions & to given them a little bit freedom to express themselves
- Teachers are more open to a wide range of level of control from balanced to full teacher control depending on students’ ability
- Agree on: high teacher control in monitoring, balanced in transitioning
After Collaboration:
- Both subjective feedback (rating) and objective feedback (system generation) should be used
We also discovered major themes for both teachers & students
Impact of Our Research
Reflection
Research process can be messy
Unlike some of my other research projects, this one started a little bit messy because we had a lot of constraints in timing, budgets, and resources. We thought about several ways to explore this question, and even though we were not sure, we decided to iterate on the research goal and design motivation, as well as taking in new information. Finally, our research method was created naturally as we became more and more familiar with our goals and our products. I learned to be comfortable with being messy, as long as I know what my goal is.
Interviewing is essentially a collaboration
In our interview process, I had the chance to lead some of the session. When I was interviewing, I found that different interviewee’s mental models were different and we needed to adjust our explanations different. Interviewees came here with their previous experiences and skeema for what things were supposed to be.Interviewing was essentially a collaboration for me, as I gradually learned about how to talk to different people and work with them to produce something meaningful and insightful.
Other Projects
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