Duration: Aug - Dec 2022
Team: Charmaine Qiu, Lanning Zhang, Mengzhe Ye, Yue Wang
My Role: Lead Designer, conducted contextual inquiries , focus group interviews, and literature reviews, also created low-fi and high-fi prototypes.
Problem Overview
City of Bridge High School (CoBHS) is a progressive school based in Pittsburgh. Unlike standard middle schools, this school provides individualized and non-standardized education. The educational goal is to provide learners with a more insightful and informative learning experience by increasing their awareness of their own learning process. However, during our research, we discovered that students need more support in developing their feedback-giving and receiving skills. When participating in these group learning sessions, it is hard to construct a positive feedback culture and healthy communication flows.
Solution
Our team thinks it is crucial to provide more scaffolding during the peer learning process where students can enhance their skills in effectively engaging and supporting others throughout various processes. Therefore, we created an app focusing on providing te feedback training units. In this learning app, students can learn how to provide constructive feedback to peers, ask neutral questions in the critiques, and keep respectful, not judgmental, attitudes when sharing their feedback. At the same time, they could know how to ask specific questions to others in order to gain useful feedback.
My Contribution
As the lead designer of the team, I led the contextual inquiry and worked on developing the interview protocol for the semi-structured interviews. I took charge of creating the project plan and breaking it down into different milestones, and ensuring that the entire team's progress could meet our internal timelines.
I also took the lead on creating the low-fidelity, and mid-fidelity wireframes and conducted moderated and unmoderated usability tests.
Research:
Contextual Inquiries Focus Group Interview
We interviewed Randy, the principal of CoBHS, and two instructors(Blain Schiff and Tim Stapleton) and learning from the interview outcomes, we gained two valuable insights.
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Instructors have a goal to reinforce this personality-building process by promoting student and teacher interactions.
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The culture of this interaction is through informal feedback sessions, which are flexible and engaging.
A contextual inquiry interview with Blain Schiff during the math class.
A contextual inquiry interview with Tim Stapleton during the history class.
After that, we also conducted a semi-structured interview with student focus groups. During the conversation with three students, we summarized three insights:
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Students prefer to receive the timely feedback coming from instructors and peers that scaffolded their learning. The learning environment encourages students to ask for informal feedback.
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The majority of students expressed a need for critical thinking skills, such as how to better independently analyze the advice they receive.
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Students appreciated each other's strengths in different areas and were willing to share their project progress and suggestions. This means that informative feedback motivates students' learning processes in CoBHS and scaffolds the instructional activities.
Define the concepts
After the focus group meeting, we first categorized the data collected from user studies and then analyzed them with an affinity map. Then we concluded three main categories: relationships between teachers and students, students’ identities; and students’ ability in transferring knowledge.
Affinity Mapping
Categorizing and sorting qualitative information
To better represent the students’ identity and reflect their interests and needs as the center of our design, we choose to apply the identity model to consolidate our findings. We also linked their needs with the instructional team’s responses. As mentioned in Holtzblatt’s book, the identity model could represent key values of the targeted user group (Holtzblatt & Beyer, 2017). We defined the model by categorizing these identity elements into three groups: I like; I am; and I want to.
Contextual Inquiries Model
Insights
In the discovery phase, we concluded the goals and challenges from both the instructor's and students' perspectives. According to the questions raised by students and teachers, we realized creating a constructive feedback culture among CoBHS is a key component of the personalized learning process. More importantly, informal peer feedback in these group activities helps them to reflect on their learning process actively and promote students to explore deeply in learning progress. Here are four main challenges when they receive and provide feedback to peers.
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As a presenter, students have trouble quickly digesting vague or abstract feedback from peers or teachers during presentation sessions.
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As a presenter, students feel difficult to generate specific and astute questions to deepen the dialogues and ask for useful suggestions for the future development of their work.
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As a responder, students need more scaffolding on not only providing relevant and constructive feedback but also laying the groundwork for the presenter to hear the opinion from a non-defensive posture.
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After the presentation, students don't have a recording or document storage system for them to reflect on fragmented feedback.
Problem
Statement
How might we design a learning tool that can help students learn to better give and receive constructive feedback from peers/instructors during the structured in-class presentation?
Speed Dating
Based on the previous discovery phase, we designed the four storyboards to collect opinions and suggestions of the stakeholders(students mainly) during speed dating, and hoped to find the future design direction in these issues. The participants' responses helped us to clarify several important issues.
Storyboard - Project Showcase Board
Storyboard - Feedback Bank
We found out participants agreed that the both feedback bank and showcase board idea would be effective to build a culture of structured critiques during the in-class presentations. Since students from COBHS receive timely informal and formal feedback from peers and teachers all the time, they need some training units so that students can practice this session with teachers during their spare time. In addition, they also need some embedded tool within these training units to help organize and assist with feedback sessions
Research Consolidation
To understand how to provide and receive high-quality feedback, we read the book Critical Response Process by Liz Berman. From her book, we knew a systematic feedback methodology about how to facilitate constructive conversations between presenters and audiences.
We decided to adopt this method and define our students who present his/her projects as presenters, the audience of the presentation as responders, and teachers as facilitators. Then we tried to use the service blueprint to help us understand each service stage, and important interactions between different actors, and identify touch points. Firstly, we defined the main stages of our service innovation:
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Statement of Meaning: The facilitator will ask responders to talk about what was meaningful in the work they have just witnessed. They will set the stage of the current process.
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Artists as Questioners (Artists need to ask responders specific questions). They need to ask specific questions to guide and lead the conversations.
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Responders pose neutral questions regarding the artwork, and the artist provides answers. These questions are neutral when they do not have underlying opinions or biases.
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Advice for improvement: Responders state opinions for improvements and the artist has the choice to disagree with these comments.
Service Blueprint
I created the service blueprint to identify key users' actions and map interactions that learners perform while interacting within the training unit. Diagramming through the blueprint helped me to refine the elements of our idea.
Lo-Fi Iteration
Based on the insights collected from presenting our mapping to reviewers, we sketched and iterated the design solutions
User Testing
We have an overall 6 user testings with students and teachers about our wireframes.
Positive comments were made about having an app like Feedbee creating equal attention and accessibility for all students, especially for ones who are shy to reach out, or who may have special needs for learning.
We also collected these insightful comments on our wireframes which could help us to work on further improvement of our apps.
Iterations
Learning from previous positive feedback and suggestions on improvements, our team refines our Lo-Fi iterations and iterates our Mid-Fi version after solving these three design challenges.
Feature 01
AI-powered Feedback
Create Learning Personal and Adaptive based on Students' Progress.
In the presentation session, some users suggest they might need more resources and just-in-time help to create a constructive response for the presenters. In order to foster help-seeking behaviors, we implemented a generative AI to provide more individualized feedback and suggestions while transcribing the content.
Feature 02
Different Study Mode
Offer Flexibility and Personalized Guidance during the Learning.
One consideration for our app is that students have different ways of learning and communicating. If the student does not want to follow a designed routine, there may be an informal substitution for the process. Therefore, we created an informal way of the feedback session that has no constraints on time and have Generative AI to foster help-seeking behaviors by providing more concrete examples.
Feature 03
Self Reflection Journal
Motivate Students to Self-regulate their Learning of Feedback Skills.
The previous iterations only provide the summative assessments and some users stated more formative ones could be included to motivate students' metacognitive skills. Therefore, we added a session in which both presenters and responders will be assigned a final task before they exit the session: a one-minute reflective journal.
Final Design
Here's the latest prototype with some of our updated changes and user flow.
AI-Assisted Assessment
Based on the recording, generative AI can analyze the text then categorize these paragraphs into different stages. It can also generate a personalized assessment and provide feedback on student’s performance.
AI-powered Suggestions
The app can provide more individualized
feedback and suggestions while
transcribing the content
Booking the Training Session
Schedule the session with instructors
Take aways
Throughout the process, an important challenge that our team encountered was not gaining enough direct insights from students of CoBHS.
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it was oftentimes difficult to set expectations for a high-school student’s ability to articulate their problems and the reasonings behind them. Since we are not directly related to the CoBHS community and are a bit unfamiliar with the culture of current high school students, it was hard to establish rapport before the interviews.
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It took some time for our team to understand the culture of the feedback-given in CoBHS. We initially decided to incorporate more feedback giving in a group project context; however, after realizing that group projects are rare in CoBHS, we pivoted to curating feedback sessions during break time for all kinds of projects from students.
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