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Thursday, December 11th, 2014
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| 12:00a |
Tracking what students grasp As a teaching assistant at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2010, Amit Maimon MBA ’11 witnessed the origins of a technological phenomenon: Smartphones and tablets had started creeping into the classroom in the hands of students.
But instead of dismissing these devices as distractions, Maimon saw a way to leverage them to help teachers get a better idea of what students grasp during lectures.
That year, Maimon co-developed Socrative, an app that lets teachers design or select premade quizzes for students to answer, publicly or anonymously, on personal mobile devices during lectures. The app is now being used by about 1.1 million teachers and millions of students across the globe.
The idea is that students respond better to quizzes deployed via mobile devices — “which they’re already staring at,” Maimon says — and many feel more comfortable answering questions anonymously. For the teacher, the accumulated data gives immediate feedback on student comprehension — allowing tailoring of lectures to address problematic material — and tracks student or class progress over time.
“Teachers benefit tremendously by having knowledge of what their students find easy or difficult, what they’re understanding or not, in the moment, in class,” says Maimon, who co-founded a startup, also called Socrative, to commercialize the app. “Teachers [with Socrative] can see how well the class is doing in a very detailed way, and see who’s struggling more, what the class doesn’t understand, and even which students can help others.”
Quizzes can be designed, using a “teacher” app, on any mobile device — either as one-off questions or as a series of true-or-false, multiple-choice, or open-ended questions. In the classroom, students can punch in a class’s identification number on their “student” apps and answer away. Color-coded results for each student and question pop up instantly in the teacher app in rows and columns, with green boxes indicating correct responses, and red boxes indicating incorrect responses.
Importantly, the app is a time-saver — grading is automatic, and there’s a growing database of premade quizzes designed and shared by teachers — which has contributed to its wide adoption, Maimon says. In June, after accumulating 750,000 teacher users worldwide, Socrative sold for $5 million in stock and cash to MasteryConnect, a company that provides digital student-assessment tools to around 85 percent of U.S. school districts.
Current Socrative employees — including two co-founders, Benjamin Berte and Michael West — are further developing the app under MasteryConnect. (After the acquisition, Maimon is no longer part of the company.)
From classroom to classroom
Socrative was conceived and trialed in course 15.060 (Data, Models, Decisions), where Maimon served as a teaching assistant. Frequently, after lectures, students would pose questions about certain aspects of material that were not fully addressed in class, reflecting an understanding that was very different from what he might have expected.
Back then, the only real-time student-response systems were “clickers” — remote-control-like devices with buttons students can press to answer questions or vote in class. But teachers usually rent those systems, which can be expensive, and the systems are difficult to implement.
Seeing the inevitability of mobile devices in the classroom, Maimon recruited fellow MIT Sloan students — Slava Menn MBA ’11, Puneet Newaskar SM ’03, MBA ’11, Karan Singh MBA ’11, Tal Snir MBA ’11, and Jaime Contreras MBA ’11 — to help build an early prototype for an app that would send out a few multiple-choice questions on material he taught during class.
When he used the app in class a few days later, Maimon saw the potential power of gathering anonymous, real-time data. First, his students voted on answers to lesson-based questions by a show of hands. Then the students weighed in anonymously on the same questions on the prototype app. Maimon saw that certain answers received more votes anonymously than by a show of hands. One reason, he posits: Students may be uncomfortable admitting they don’t understand, so they don’t ask for clarification.
“That’s when the power of real-time anonymity came in, which is fantastic because it changes the social layout,” he says. “If you’re afraid of asking a question because you think you’re the only one who doesn’t understand it, and then suddenly you remove that barrier, you see many others don’t understand as well, and it changes people’s comfort levels.”
In 2010, Maimon recruited Berte and West, and turned to mentors in MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service and Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship for advice on marketing and financing, among other things. In 2011, they joined the Imagine K-12 startup accelerator in Palo Alto, Calif., and grew out their team.
“It was internal and external momentum,” Maimon says. “The more we saw people being excited about it from the outside, and the more we brought in team members who were excited about carrying this forward internally, the more we realized this is turning into an actual company.”
That momentum carried Socrative through to the 2012-13 academic year, when the app saw 278,000 quizzes created and shared by more than 3 million teachers and students worldwide, with more than 1,000 teacher users joining per day.
The experience of teachers
Today, other companies have released similar student-response tools. But what sets Socrative apart, Maimon says, is a core focus on K-12 teachers, which informs its simple design.
The app, for instance, has dedicated K-12 features, making it accessible to a broad audience, Maimon says. Apart from quizzes, a “space race” feature lets students compete for the most correct responses; “exit tickets” let students weigh in on what they learned — and what they’d like to learn — as they’re leaving the class.
This simplicity is especially important for teachers trying to educate dozens of students — sometimes very young — without disrupting class. “The experience of the teachers in the class became core to everything we do: making sure that it’s seamless. We knew that if we can’t make it simple enough for core users, we aren’t going to intro more teachers into our system,” Maimon says.
Today, testimonials on the company’s website — and countless online reviews from K-12 teachers of all disciplines — laud the app for its simplicity, as well as for saving time, helping students better understand material, and providing clear data analysis on student progress.
Having reached so many teachers, Socrative is expanding its mission — such as by using data to improve and personalize K-12 education. For instance, Maimon says, should some students learn by video or by lecture? What lessons should be taught by hands-on, experiential methods? Overall, how can we provide better tools for teachers to help every student based on individual needs?
“We need a body of data that is available to start deriving meaningful insights about how to tailor learning methods to students,” Maimon says. “That’s the lofty objective.” | | 2:00p |
What really killed the dinosaurs? Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid more than five miles wide smashed into the Earth at 70,000 miles per hour, instantly vaporizing upon impact. The strike obliterated most terrestrial life, including the dinosaurs, in a geological instant: Heavy dust blocked out the sun, setting off a cataclysmic chain of events from the bottom of the food chain to the top, killing off more than three-quarters of Earth’s species — or so the popular theory goes.
But now scientists at MIT and elsewhere have found evidence that a major volcanic eruption began just before the impact, possibly also playing a role in the extinction.
The team precisely dated rocks from the Deccan Traps — a region of west-central India that preserves remnants of one of the largest volcanic eruptions on Earth. Based on their analysis, the researchers determined that the eruption began 250,000 years before the asteroid strike and continued for 500,000 years after the giant impact, spewing a total of 1.5 million square kilometers of lava.
The immense and long-lasting volcanism may have released dangerous levels of volatile chemicals into the air, poisoning the atmosphere and oceans.
“If models of volatile release are correct, we’re talking about something similar to what’s happening today: lots of carbon dioxide being emitted into the atmosphere very rapidly,” says Michael Eddy, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “Ultimately what that can do is lead to ocean acidification, killing a significant portion of plankton — the base of the food chain. If you wipe them out, then you’d have catastrophic effects.”
Based on the new, more precise dates for the Deccan Traps, the researchers believe the massive eruptions may have played a significant role in extinguishing the dinosaurs — although the exact kill mechanism may never be known.
“I don’t think the debate will ever go away,” says Sam Bowring, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT. “The [asteroid] impact may have caused the extinction. But perhaps its effect was enhanced because things were softened up a bit by the eruption of these volcanoes.”
Bowring and Eddy are authors of a paper published in Science, along with colleagues at Princeton University, the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and Amravati University in India.
A one-two punch
Prior to 1980, the exact cause of dinosaurs’ demise was unknown; one hypothesis proposed that they were killed off by massive volcanic eruptions. (Similar episodes have subsequently been shown to have played a role in two other mass extinctions, the end-Permian and end-Triassic.) But the 1980 discovery in Italy of iridium, a rare element primarily found in extraterrestrial materials, suggested otherwise.
“They eventually found a crater in the early ’90s, so the smoking gun of the story seemed to be perfect: An asteroid caused the mass extinction,” Eddy says. “In fact, a few people have suggested that there is evidence for environmental degradation before the impact.”
It’s long been known that a major eruption occurred in India around the time of the end-Cretaceous extinction, but this event had never been precisely dated. The MIT and Princeton researchers used high-precision geochronology to determine the age of rocks in the Deccan Traps, to evaluate whether the eruptions began before the extinction — a necessity, if volcanism was indeed the cause.
“The story that is emerging is that perhaps both might have been involved,” Bowring says. “Perhaps the end of the dinosaurs was caused by a one-two punch.”
Dating from the bottom up
In December 2013, the team made an expedition to the Deccan Traps, east of Mumbai, a region known for its expansive, step-like topology. (The term “traps” is Swedish for “stairs.”)
For two weeks, the researchers looked for volcanic rocks that might contain zircon — a uranium-containing mineral that forms in magma shortly after an eruption, and that can be used as a very precise clock for determining the age of rocks; the mineral typically crystallizes in magma containing high amounts of silica and zirconium.
The researchers collected more than 50 samples of rocks from the region representing the largest pulse of volcanism. Fortunately, samples from both the bottom and top of this volcanic layer contained zircon, allowing the team to pinpoint the timing of the beginning and end of the Deccan Traps eruptions.
The researchers analyzed the rocks separately at Princeton and MIT to make sure the dates determined in one lab could be replicated in another lab. In both laboratories, the scientists pulverized rocks and separated out millimeter-length grains of zircon. To determine the age of zircon, and the rock from which it came, the teams measured the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes.
The group’s analysis indicates that the region of the Deccan Traps started erupting 250,000 years before the asteroid strike, continuing for another 500,000 years after the impact.
“We have 750,000 years as the duration for the main pulse of volcanism, but it’d be nice to know whether that time represents a constant flux of magma, or if pulses of magmatism were erupted over an even shorter period of time,” Eddy says. “Can we pick things apart at the 10,000-year level and see correlations between an individual pulse of volcanism and environmental change? That’s where we need to go with this study.”
Adds Bowring: “We’re getting better and better at dating mass-extinction events, but we’re not having a comparable improvement in our understanding of what caused them. Now that the timing is so well-resolved, I think there will be people coming back to think about the cause with new vigor.”
This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation. | | 6:00p |
MIT community engages in dialogue on race “At MIT, every semester is a hard semester,” MIT President Rafael Reif said at Wednesday afternoon’s Winterfest, in remarks to the MIT community. “For many members of our community, this semester, and especially the events of the last few weeks, in Missouri and Staten Island, have been hard in a completely different way.”
Ten minutes earlier, Reif — like all Winterfest attendees arriving at the Stata Center — had walked past a silent protest: Dozens of members of the MIT community stood outside each of the building’s entrances in silence as a cold drizzle fell, many of them clad in black T-shirts displaying the words “#Black Lives Matter.”
Many of those protesters then came inside to listen to Reif’s remarks. For many at MIT, Reif said, the recent events have been “hurtful, deeply disturbing, and heartbreaking.” Referring to the protesters he’d seen outside, Reif added, “Today, some members of our community organized a demonstration to say, through their silence, that black lives matter. … That the injustices of our society make this statement necessary is incredibly sad.”
Reif said the ongoing pursuit of racial equality and social justice “is one of the world’s great challenges. … Recent events have shown us, again, that terrible fault lines of race are still a major issue in our society. It would be naïve to think that we at MIT are somehow immune to these problems: MIT is a microcosm of our broader society. It shares many of its flaws, as well as its virtues.”
Reif noted that the protesters “are asking us to listen, to collaborate, and to act.”
“Black Lives Matter”
Less than two hours later, inside Building E51, some 400 members of the MIT community — including about 100 who overflowed Wong Auditorium — participated in a dialogue on race at MIT that featured a panel discussion, as well as smaller group sessions. The event, called “Black Lives Matter,” was sponsored by MIT’s Institute Equity and Community Office, along with the Black Students Union, Black Women’s Alliance, and Black Graduate Student Association.
Moderator Mareena Robinson-Snowden, a fourth-year PhD student in nuclear science and engineering, began by expressing the special responsibility MIT students have: “We are leaders in the solutions-building business,” she said.
Panelist Andrew Jones ’10, SM ’14 added a further positive note, saying he was energized by the demonstrations and the more open dialogue he’d observed around issues of racism. “I’m excited by what will happen next,” Jones said. “These protests will keep going forward as people realize racism didn’t end with the election of Barack Obama as president.”
In her remarks, Ayida Mthembu, associate dean for Student Support Services, cited the nation’s long history of racism.
“We, as a nation, have a covenant that we have to keep,” Mthembu said. “We’re in a long struggle of over 400 years. In the 1960s, when I was in college, we had the same things happening. It’s amazing how memory closes off the past. I’ve been visited by many students filled with rage, frustration, and anger. I try to tell them, ‘You’re part of a process, you’re not alone.’ We’re in trouble if we can’t get the rage down and the dialogue up.”
Senior Ikenna Enwere, a chemical engineering major, echoed Mthembu: “It’s a very stressful time on campus. We want a climate here where the institution reaches out to us before we need to act.”
Melissa Nobles, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor in the Department of Political Science, urged students not to assume that their academic work is somehow separate from issues of social justice. “Yes, you’re scientists and engineers,” she said, “but you’re also citizens who need to understand the society you inhabit, and race is a big part of that.”
Panelist Tammy Stevens ’96, ’97, associate dean of academic and professional programs, said her MIT education taught her how to solve problems, and not just technical ones. “I’m a doer,” Stevens said. “We can’t just keep repeating history. We need to put an infrastructure in place here at MIT” to promote social justice — such as a required class in social justice, Stevens said.
Mthembu highlighted the need to engage in open dialogue about race, despite the potential discomfort. She described a dialogue with a white person who wanted to know, “How should I refer to you?” When Mthembu suggested the person simply call her “Ayida,” she got a head-shaking response: “No, I mean what do I call your people?”
As the audience chuckled, Mthembu recalled explaining, with much patience, “Well, that’s a difficult question. My grandfather was colored. My father was a Negro. I am black. And my children are African-American.”
In order to have these vital conversations, Mthembu explained, “We have to allow for mistakes and forgive each other.” |
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