MuseInk: Seeing and hearing a freshman engineering student ink and think

Abstract

In many fundamental engineering courses, students are required to work problems on paper in order to demonstrate their understanding of course material. In first year engineering courses, there is a huge range of entering skill levels due to differing student backgrounds in math and science. Some students submit highly structured and adequately labeled work that is logical and correct, whereas some other students write down too little or too much information which makes it difficult to assess the procedure the student took to solve a problem. At Clemson University, we have developed a Tablet PC application called MuseInk that allows students to work problems using a pen and a Tablet PC, which instructors can then evaluate. They can view not only the final submission of the work, but can play back student work (including all Ink strokes and erasures) using controls similar to a DVD player. As a pedagogical tool, MuseInk allows the instructor to play back student work live in class so that the students are exposed to common misconceptions, where they occur, and engage in conversation about how to correct the procedure from a specific point in time within a student submission. In addition, instructors can insert "tags" to mark up student work, much like a traditional assignment, but the student can see what they did wrong, when they did it wrong, and learn how to correct their misconception. This gives instructors richer feedback capabilities than the traditional paper-based method because they're able to temporally evaluate processes rather than attempting to interpret a static image. We present here the features we're developing in MuseInk to facilitate research on problem solving strategies of freshman engineering students. Using MuseInk, we're able to tag interesting events during playback from a "universe" of tags we're developing to assess procedural and conceptual problem solving knowledge, and visualize the tags using built-in visualization tools. Additionally, MuseInk contains an audio recording capability that allows researchers to implement a think aloud protocol by associating the student's spoken word to a specific stroke or erasure in their problem solving strategy. This paper discusses the preliminary development of a universe of tags for assessing problems worked in a first year engineering course, initial results from think aloud interviews, and the early visualization tools that will guide our continued work on this study. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2010.