My group is working on redesigning the Bing pre-school at Stanford University. This is the first time I'm working for toddlers, having spent most of my career designing e-learning courses for adults and some K-12 stuff. This seems to be a challenging task and fun too. The readings for the class have given me some ideas, which I've listed below:
- Sue Allen article: The design should include activities for children, both solo and in a group, depending on the type of activity. However, we need to make sure that the children are able to interact with it in an effortless way. The interface or the way of interaction should be obvious with no instructions required. As little children have very short attention span, the activities need to be fairly engaging and intricsically motivating, and should sustain their engagement. As there is no restrictions on children in most of the activities, chances of their turning away from the activities is more if the activities are not interesting and engage them. The learning can be assessed by observing the children or interacting with them over a period of time.
- Bransford and Schwartz article: The researchers have pointed out that in most of the cases, we try to assess learning immediately after providing instruction, which more often than not result in a not so good performance on transfer tests. Even experts need some amount of practice to transfer their knowledge to a new situation. On short term assessments, people might perform well on recall-based rote learning; however, a longer term assessment is required to assess comprehension of the concepts and ideas and their transfer to new contexts.
Their ideas are very useful in designing a preschool environment as we expect children to learn and transfer their knowledge over a period of time. We do not want to test children on, for example, the names of dinosaurs immediately after we tell them a story about different dinosaurs. Over a period of time, with sustained efforts to provide them with more information about dinosaurs, they would be as knowledgeable as adults about dinosaurs, at which point, an informal assessment can be done to gauge their learning.
Dan Nice connections and I'm glad that these readings have been able to help support some of your transition between older learners and preschools. Also, goo djob taking on a project that is outside your realm of experience. Have you considered how the context around a preschool's campus might be able to better support assessment? Bing is a place where lots of assessment gets done and everyone feels good about it (la-la-la, etc) For example, could there be some kind of kiosk or check-in station at a kindergarten class, a park, or a supermarket or other place that preschool children also go to. Perhaps there is some way to measure what they do outside of the class and tie it back to what they do in the class. I'm looking forward to your project!