Recent social events and the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted the teaching arrangements and practices of schools. Social distancing and online or mixed mode learning activities have become part of the new “normal.” Research is needed to study the impact of such teaching arrangements on students’ learning engagement and psychosocial wellbeing. Availability of timely feedback from students can help teachers adjust their teaching strategies and revise their teaching activities effectively to address the psychosocial needs of their students and assess the effectiveness of the new teaching arrangements or practices. To attain these goals, teachers may value an online assessment tool that permits tracking of students’ wellness during class suspension and informs the design of effective teaching strategies and activities.

The team has started to build a prototype of an online student information platform for tracking students’ learning engagement and psychosocial wellbeing. Useful summative information can be generated immediately to guide reviews and innovations of the online and mixed-mode teaching materials and practices. The assessment tool provides a user-friendly interface for teachers to (1) present multimedia questions, (2) collect multimedia data from the students, and (3) track changes in students’ learning engagement and psychosocial wellness. A set of short and validated scales that take only 3 minutes to complete and allow measurement of learning engagement and psychosocial wellbeing will be pre-installed in the program for easy use. The program also includes a web management interface for teachers to create customized questions to meet their specific needs. Teachers can view the summative results using the built-in visualization tools right minutes after data collection and download the data for further analysis.

With our solution, teachers or policymakers in schools can track changes in students’ learning engagement and psychosocial wellbeing over time more cost-effectively and efficiently.The effectiveness of individual practices or activities designed for a specific group of students can be measured and the results are available almost immediately. Thus, our solution can significantly shorten the duration of the inquiry-action-feedback working cycle and improve teaching performance.

Policymaker/School management

Teachers

Students

2021

Education