Collectia Pilot: Supporting Data Collection in Special Education

Background: Special education instructors need to collect academic and behavioral data to monitor the progress of their students, but require different evaluation methods than those used on the majority of students in public schools. However, the systems and tools currently in place to facilitate this activity are labor intensive and time-consuming, making the process of data collection burdensome. If data collection were made more efficient, there would be more time for teachers to devote to teaching and preparing lessons. The intent of our project is to alleviate the strain teachers have during the traditional data collection process and in turn, enable teachers to provide higher-quality learning environments.

Objectives: The project explores one way to give public school educators relief from the duties of data management and more time to focus on teaching. Another goal was to have teachers integrate the results of their data collection to tailor their teaching to better meet the needs of each student. Our team defined the different tasks that are performed by students, and created a workflow that extends current technology to assist teachers in their day-to-day work.

Methods: Potential users were recruited and interviewed during three phases of our design—1) to identify their needs, 2) after the conceptual designs were formulated, and 3) for prototype evaluation. Six special education professionals were recruited as participants in our focus group and survey. We gathered both subjective qualitative and quantitative information from these six. Our prototyped design was developed for the Tmobile G-1 Phone, using the Android platform.

Results: This formative study helped lay the groundwork for further development. We discovered the most important features of our design are the ability to communicate daily with parents, and to possess all students' information on one device (currently they have separate clipboards for each). While the educators were impressed with the directness of the touch interaction, they were frustrated with the intricacies of activating the touch (the device was not responsive to every touch). Our results showed that the users are interested in seeing the system developed to explore its potential. All of our participants expressed interest in the project and indicated that they would recommend this design to colleagues.

Conclusions: It was important for our design team to create a system that would be convenient to users. Since many teachers we interviewed expressed a great deal of annoyance with their current systems and indicated they procrastinate with data entry. It is our observation that the perceived convenience is of importance in motivating our users to become more active in the data collection process. By focusing on developing a system that maximizes perceived convenience, teachers could directly benefit from reduced stress while students could benefit through closer monitoring. We are interested in further investigating how to provide tools to educators to help maximize teaching time and effectiveness.