Course Project: Participatory Design
Exit Tickets
Supporting Teachers: Improved Classroom Assessments
Unlocking Student Understanding: Harnessing 'Exit Tickets' for Formative Assessment
During our observation, we identified that teachers often face the challenge of consistently gauging students' understanding during lessons. As days and weeks progress, it becomes increasingly difficult for teachers to capture all relevant details in the classroom, potentially leading to missed insights crucial for lesson evaluation and development. Enter 'Exit Tickets'—a method already utilized by teachers as part of formative assessment, where students answer questions such as what they learned, what was easy or difficult, and what they need to do to learn more.
Enhancing Classroom Engagement
Our prototype, an ‘Exit Ticket’ app, addresses this challenge by offering customizable templates for teachers and a Results feature to track student responses. This digital tool serves as a complement to support teachers in enhancing teaching quality. By visually summarizing student understanding, it reduces cognitive load on teachers, allowing for quicker lesson adjustments and mitigating the risk of burnout.
Addressing Economic and Coordination Challenges
Moreover, unlike the current method of paper-based Exit Tickets, which is time-consuming for teachers to coordinate, our app streamlines the process into a single platform. This alleviates the need for teachers to juggle multiple platforms, addressing a significant drawback of the existing approach. Additionally, consolidating Exit Tickets onto one platform helps mitigate potential economic constraints for schools, as it eliminates the need to invest in multiple platforms.
Team Credits
Victor Magnusson - Observer
Hedvig Engelmark - Observer
Elin Rudling - Workshop Facilitator & Observer
Aris Emilsson - Workshop Facilitator & Observer
participatory design process
Field observation
Conducted contextual exploration through observations and interviews
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Shadowing the teachers across various lessons for a full day, identifying routine tasks
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Applied "Master/Apprentice Model" to gain comprehensive insights into the teachers' behaviors and actions
Design Workshop
Facilitated a Futures Workshop, categorizing their future vision of the solution
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Managing discussions, guiding the participants through the workshop
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Organizing thoughts into an affinity diagram and creating user scenarios
CREATING THE SOLUTION
Provided variations of user scenarios, building foundation for the participants prototypes
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Guiding participants through the process of prototyping their solutions, creating storyboards and interface design
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Creating a Prioritization Grid based on sketches and observers’ note, aiding in evaluating features and solutions for inclusion in the prototype
Evaluation
Presented diverse prototypes to participants, aiming to deepen our understanding of the problem domain
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Integrated various evaluation techniques to asses solutions more effectively, engaging user testing to provide further insights
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Conducted a Design Studio session, fostering collaborative feedback in a group setting. Shared insights on how the solution could enhance their teaching
preview the prototype >>>
IMproving my skills:
Field observer & Workshop facilitator
Gaining Insights Through Ethnographic Observation
As a field observer, I decided to identify the different levels of the teaching profession. My perception of teachers was limited to the classroom environment and I did not understand the extent of their responsibilities. Being on site gave me invaluable first-hand insights into the daily rhythm and obstacles teachers face. From navigating lesson planning to adapting teaching methods, I witnessed the dynamics between teachers, students and external influences such as resources and rules. This experience gave me a deeper respect for the crucial role that teachers play in shaping children's minds.
Directing Collective Workshops
In my role as workshop facilitator, I strived to provide clear guidance while avoiding influencing participants' ideas. By encouraging open expression, the participants were able to independently explore their own solutions. Despite the initial expectations I had of the teachers before the brainstorming sessions, they demonstrated good abilities to discuss thoughts and ideas, leading to unexpected insights and perspectives. During the prototyping session, there were some comments from the participants that they lacked the ability to draw, were not creative, etc. and were creating obstacles for themselves. But by guiding them over these obstacles as a facilitator, observing their lack of confidence and meeting them halfway, their belief in themselves increased and the participants came up with very valuable solutions for the prototype.