EAMS 2018 Take Aways from Day One

E-Assessment in the Mathematical Sciences 2018

What is the EAMS Conference?

Today I had the pleasure of attending day 1 of the EAMS 2018 conference in Newcastle University. EAMS stands for E-Assessment in Mathematical Sciences. I previously attended this conference in 2016 together with Julie Crowley but today I had to brave it alone. The content of the conference lands wonderfully somewhere in the intersections between Mathematics, Pedagogy, Education Technology and Computer Science. Each speaker seems to come at the problem of E-assessment in Maths from a slightly different perspective thus making the conference a fabulous melting pot of ideas and knowledge.
I had this great idea to write a take aways blog post for each day. However when I actually sit down to write it I realise that I learned far too much today to easily to sum it all up in a neat little post with a snappy title. On top of that I had planned to write it immediately while things were still fresh but now I'm thinking maybe I need some time for processing and ruminating. Regardless of all this I'll give it a bash to at least document some of the things I learned/encountered today and if nothing else it will serve as a reminder to me when I go to write something more in depth on these topics later. I'll focus on just two of the talks from today and then just jot down a few other things that I need to look into more.

The Keynote this morning was entitled "A view into the various layers of adaptive learning in Mathematics" and was presented by Mohamad Jebara from Mathspace. I loved this talk as it made me think about things I had never considered before. The speaker explained really clearly to us the three layers of adaptive learning:Inner Loop, Middle Loop, Outer Loop.
The Inner Loop of adaptive learning takes place within a question. It provides step by step feedback and should be able to respond to the path the student takes through the question and give relevant feedback and hints for the student through the path they have chosen to take.
The Middle Loop of adaptive learning manifests at the point when the program must make a decision about what question to serve the student next. Item Response theory was mentioned here and I've taken a note that I need to read up on this theory because I don't think I'd ever heard of it before. The decision can be purely based on whether the student got the previous question correct or incorrect but it can also include such factors as response time and guessability. I was very impressed by the examples shown in this section of the talk and how the student could be led through increasing levels of difficult by the gradually removing of scaffolding. The speaker also highlighted the fact that an effective middle loop keeps the student in their Zone of Proximal Development (their "sweet spot" for learning).
The Outer Loop of adaptive learning selects the topic or subtopics a student should be working on. I was blown away by the knowledge graph we were shown from Mathspace. I have certainly thought a lot about prerequisite knowledge before but I have never seen it laid out so explicitly and in a visual form. I LOVED this idea of Plotting each topic with it's connections to previous topics and future topics.

Near the end of the afternoon Graham Orpwood presented a talk entitled "Closing the Numeracy Gap: Using Technology to Support Increased Student Success". Graham was talking particularly about the system called 'Elevate my Maths' that was developed for use in Canada. This talk really struck a chord with me as I always love working with exactly the type of student that this system is designed for and myself and Julie have often discussed how it would be great to offer students the chance to work on something to bridge the gap between where they are at and where they need to be. Having worked in the area of Maths Learning Support I could see how the Elevate my Maths programme might be a tool that I would love to use with students. I really liked Graham's quote about  "The Myth of the Math Gene". It reminded me of this great image I've seen before on twitter from scaffoldedmath.

How to be a Math Person

I was very interested to learn that perhaps most of the difficulties I see students having all the time are related to topics that they were first introduced to in late primary education.

Other small bits and pieces that caught my interest and I intend to learn more about..
I'd never seen the Hannah's sweets question but I thought it was really nice. I must try that out sometime without any scaffolding in a thinking classroom style setting. I think it could work well in a VRG and VNPS set up.
I liked the random name generator for questions in Numbas. It might give a nice bit of authenticity to questions (Christian said they had included Welsh names but are there any Caoimhes or Saoirses for the Irish context I wonder..)
I really need to learn more about the use of LTI for Numbas. It seems to be the way forward.
Chris Sangwin mentioned that Stack is a question type in Moodle. I must find out more about that and  do some experimenting with it.