Principal Investigators: Bill Hart Davidson, PhD, Michigan State University
Jim Porter, PhD, Michigan State University

Project Background:

In September 2005, the project leaders for the “Teachers for a New Era” (TNE) project contacted two co-directors of the WIDE Research Center about doing a study to determine how the “Teacher Knowledge Standards” (TKS)developed by the TNE project team could best be delivered to its intended users — that is, “MSU students preparing for teaching careers, all faculty involved in their disciplinary and pedagogical preparation, K-12 teachers and administrators, and public officials responsible for educational policy” (“Teacher Knowledge Standards,” Nov.2004, p. 1). The WIDE team conducted a study, focused mainly on interviewing students and teachers in the literacy area of Teacher Education, with the aim, first, of determining how students and teachers in the teacher preparation program actually think about and use standards in their work, and, second, of developing an overall “information model” that the TNE project could use to present Teacher Knowledge Standards (TKS) in a way that would make them “useful and usable” to their intended users.

During our contextual inquiries with local teacher educators and teacher candidates, our users indicated how crucial establishing a dynamic relationship with standards is for them to consider integrating them into their teaching and student learning goals. Furthermore, the reality that teachers, students, and graduate teacher education instructors will enact multiple roles at the same time, and throughout their professional career, is never accounted for in traditional interface design for standards—usually in print form, or on a website that functions as a repository rather than a pedagogical tool. 

To support their educational and pedagogical goals and practices, our design team created what we call a “Literacy Resource Exchange” to serve as a means for teacher educators and their students to share materials and at the same time allow users to link those materials to programmatic teacher knowledge standards.  Unlike traditional hierarchically structured systems, our design features afford for collaboration, the ability for users to add to and alter resources, and the possibility for one user to hold multiple user roles within the system.  Specifically, we rely on a bottom-up categorization approach, known among bloggers as a “folksonomy,” which relies on aggregation and grouping of commonly used terms rather than adherence to a hierarchical structure. Each time a user adds new information, the system keeps track of what kind of content it is (resource, comment, or post) as well as any other information they might offer about the content they add such as the type of resource, the subject area it applies most readily to, and the standards it is most closely associated with. Each of these bits of information, once stored by the system, links to collections of resources that have similar attributes. So once you have added a syllabus for an elementary Social Studies class, for example, you can see others who have added a syllabus like yours. 

More importantly, our Literacy Resource Exchange addresses some of the pedagogical vexations conveyed by the teacher educators during their interviews; moments we as educators are all familiar with such as, the inability to track their comments or to follow if and when their suggestions to students become evident in the students’ later work. In our Literacy Resource Exchange, instructors and students can “tag” comments, which later allows them to aggregate and track comments within and between resources.  The Resource Exchange also provides a space for collaborative writing and revision, an opportunity for educators to discuss standards with one another, and to discover ways that other educators have effectively integrated them heuristically into their teaching.  Finally, by using the Literacy Resource Exchange in their teacher education classes, teacher educators are able to model for their students the effective use of an educational technology. 

Project Objectives:

Our goal is to design an interface that aimed to answer the following question:

• How can we help facilitate convergence among complex and lengthy standards, everyday teaching practice, and teacher experience?

Our design and research methodology addresses how to use the affordances of digital technologies to integrate standards into the everyday practice of the educators who use them. The goal of this project is to create a “learning community” in which all contribute to developing resources for the group.