brian buser July 30, 2009
Check out Ari’s interview with Politics Daily about Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) and the web. Here is a sample:
Ari explains, “I think the AIED systems of the future will be less about teaching directly, and more about providing guidance: when and how a student would benefit from working with someone else (perhaps a teacher, tutor, or peer.) When I get stuck solving a particular type of problem, who (that’s online and available) can best help me understand it? A good system will have predicted the frustrating challenge, and will have already lined up the person best-suited to explaining it to me in a way that I will understand. After I’ve demonstrated that I mastered the necessary skills, who can I then explain it to, both to help them and to clarify it for myself? A good system will be able to seamlessly coordinate this process.”
Ari’s interview was used in a larger story, which featured Grockit, about web 2.0 technology entering the education industry. We expect you will be hearing a lot more from Ari and his great work in the months to come. Stay tuned!
brian buser July 29, 2009
“Smart Technology Breeds Smart Students in Web Test Prep Market” by Frances Tobin
To be sure, Grockit…[is] still operating on the fringes of their market in many ways. However, their disruptive potential is clear.
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brian buser July 29, 2009
“Education, A.I., and the Web: Interviewing Grockit’s Ari Bader-Natal” by Frances Tobin
Grockit’s Chief Learning Architect Ari Bader-Natal provides thoughts on the future of test prep, and adaptive learning models in general.
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brian buser July 29, 2009
We’re excited to announce a new feature that allows test prep experts to lead games in Grockit as teachers. Teachers can lead games in all SAT and GMAT skill areas. This is good news for students who will now have more opportunity to join study games targeted to their areas of need. Teacher led games are indicated by a “Taught by” section as can be seen in this image.
Some teacher led games will require a fee to reserve a place in the game. This helps ensure we have the highest quality teachers and most interested students playing. All the teachers who are leading games have extensive test prep experience and have been through an interview process with Grockit. If you think you got what it takes to become a teacher in Grockit, please contact us. We’d also love to hear from students who have played a teacher led game. We welcome your feedback at any time.
brian buser July 25, 2009
“Rock It with Grockit” by Kelly Roell
Unlike traditional test prep websites, where you sit alone on a page and answer question after mind-numbing question, Grockit offers interactive play with other people studying for the same test you are…. Studying for the SAT? Necessary, but evil. Gaming with your friends online? Not quite as a boring.
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brian buser July 22, 2009
“Pursuing an Academic Edge at Home” by Joseph De Avila
…a new generation of online educational products aimed at supplementing students’ education at home.
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brian buser July 14, 2009
Grockit games can now be customized by skill tags and difficulty level. This helps you optimize your study time. Custom games are best explained with an example.
They work something like this; Sue is studying for the GMAT and her Grockit analytics indicate she needs the most improvement on Verbal questions. More specifically, Sentence Correction and Idioms give her the most trouble. Knowing this, Sue creates a custom game and selects the Sentence Correction and the Idiom skill tags to include. This creates a game which only contains these two types of questions. You can see the summary that Sue sees when she is creating the game in this picture.
In addition, Sue can adjust the difficulty level of the questions to her level of ability. In short, custom games make it easier than ever for Sue to optimize her study time and concentrate on the areas she needs the most practice.
Ari Bader-Natal July 13, 2009
I’m blogging today from a plane, on my way home from the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. The conference — a biennial meeting of researchers who build and study software systems that help students learn — began with a number of sessions organized around specific topics, including a great workshop on Intelligent Educational Games. At this workshop, I introduced Grockit to an international group of scholars researching various uses of games in learning.
I spoke about how we leverage various game mechanics (think: XP, GP, badges, quests, leader-boards, etc) in order to help motivate and engage students in learning-conducive activities (such as helping each other!) One particularly interesting finding that I reported was on the effect of varying if and when students had access to Quests (a tailored, student-specific sequence of questions informed by our Item Response Theory model.) We found that students who could only access a Quest by “unlocking” it — by answering a specified number of questions during collaborative practice games — rated measurably higher with regards to several of the outcomes that we strive to maximize. (Perhaps the presence of an attainable goal to work towards served as a motivator for students to continue to engage?) More details are included in the short paper included in the workshop proceedings.
(While this is the first experimental outcome that we’ve published, it is only one of many randomized controlled experiments that we have run in our system. For the past several months, we’ve been relying on a custom-built split testing infrastructure to (near-effortlessly) run and evaluate small-scale experiments in any part of our system. The topic merits its own discussion, so I’ll save the details for a future blog entry…)
One of my favorite parts of a conference like this one is the opportunity to talk — face-to-face — with other people who are thinking deeply about similar issues in very different ways. In addition to the conversations in and around the Games workshop, I found myself caught up in discussions on a number of other key issues that we think about at Grockit: designing learning environments for out-of-school use, the promises and challenges inherent to peer collaboration, the scalability and adoption issues specific to educational software, striking a balance (or mix) between AI-assisted learning and peer-assisted learning, and how to use the learning data collected about students today to improve our systems for students tomorrow (both figuratively and literally.)
It’s been a full week and I’ll be happy to get off the plane. But it’s satisfying to know that on Monday morning, I have a notebook to open that is now filled with new insights and ideas about how we can better foster learning among our Grockiteers.
angela tombari July 8, 2009
Diagnostic Linking Pattern (not to scale)
At Grockit we believe in collaborative learning and continual improvement. This is an ideal we encourage both in our users and in ourselves. Towards this end, we continually research and develop more exact methods for estimating question difficulty and student ability to enhance the Grockit experience.
Grockit diagnostics indicate current capability level for our users by capitalizing on the mathematical tools of item response theory. These are the same methods used by major testing companies to create computer adaptive tests (CAT) such as the GMAT.
Our capacity to estimate current capability for the individual depends upon the belief that if item A is more difficult than item B, item A should be more difficult than item B consistently across people.
Getting the item difficulty estimates was one of the early keys to providing better feedback for our members. Early on, this was a fairly arduous process because data from practice questions left us with a sparse data matrix that required many levels of data filtering to ensure reliable estimates. As an example of the filtering, people were only included in these calculations if they had both correct and incorrect responses to practice questions. We could not include data from those people because the information did not help us determine which questions are more or less difficult.
In addition to our desire to get away from the intensive filtering, we also wanted a way to get difficulty estimates for the new questions that we publish on a continuous basis.
Our new approach entails making our diagnostics dual purpose. Not only do the diagnostics serve to estimate members’ current capabilities, they also increase the accuracy of our estimation process. We have implemented a shifting diagnostic schedule in which certain questions serve as links from group to group, enabling us to place all of our data on the same metric. Newly published questions are also included so that every question on Grockit gets a difficulty estimate as soon as possible.
More importantly for our members, we already have solid difficulty estimates on enough diagnostic questions to generate the ability estimates necessary for targeted quests. With the new shifting diagnostic plan, we are now able to rapidly turn out new content with scientifically-based difficulties and experience points. Take a diagnostic on Grockit and see where you rank!
brian buser July 5, 2009
“6 Great Tools for LSAT, SAT and GMAT Test Prep” by Dana Oshiro
If you’re spending your summer prepping, these might just help you gain the confidence you need to come out on top.
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