Nearly every student on campus will have taken an art history course by graduation. And why not? The art history department is world renowned, and who has not read about or been influenced by Vincent Scully? But for all that is to be gained through art history courses, they come with their share of problems. One of the most obvious of these is the inconveniences of photo study. Not that your index cards with two stick figures and blob in the corner labeled "angel" aren't considered masterpieces; or that traipsing to Street Hall in the wee hours of the night isnŐt the most fun idea, but there are some areas where the whole process could be made easier on students, faculty, and the collections themselves. Motivated by this educational need and the recent appearance of some remarkable software tools connecting the Web hypertext markup language (HTML) to database servers, a computer science student together with the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media is exploring educational possibilities that might make art coursework, and perhaps a lot of subjects, more effective and easier. Most important, this experiment in computer-assisted learning will address whether computer networks can be used to help students understand their learning progress.
Imagine sitting in the comfort of a your dorm room in front of your Power PC, laser printer, and fax machine (all right, your Mac Classic) while you use your favorite Web browser to leisurely test the level of your knowledge of the photo study images with the gentle sounds of Bob Marley, Beethoven, or whomever in the background. No one will be elbowing you to see the same photo you are studying; and the room temperature will only be as bad as your own radiator makes it. And if you study best at 4:00 AM, you don't have to beat your head against a locked door to Street Hall. Any networked computer can access the photos - you could even study at home over breaks.
With a new set of Web pages being developed at the Center for Advanced Instructional Media, art history students will soon be able to quiz themselves with digitized images of the photo study, as opposed to their hand-drawn note cards.
Once the student logs-on, quiz question after question, along with the results of the student's correct or incorrect responses will be fed back to the student instantaneously on a Web browser. Not only will the full color images be displayed with the artists, styles, and years, but the student will receive updated statistics on his or her performance relative to her or his peers on each question. Now you can know how you are doing compared to the rest of the class, so you know whether to pull that all-nighter or to go to bed at twelve knowing you're going to get an A.
The Web pages retrieve the images, quiz questions, and responses from a local database (currently mSQL, but eventually Oracle) through small computer programs written in Perl. The quiz questions can be updated in the database as the professor changes the course material. Because the results of each quiz will also be stored back to the database, student accomplishment statistics can be calculated using continuously calculated information. These same Perl programs calculate the percentage of students who give the same response to a given question. That percentage is displayed on each response page along with a results page at the end of the quiz. The results page will give a complete break down of the student's performance, side by side with class averages. Of course, these visual quizzes will probably not relate to the sort of questions asked on a real exam, but the students can walk into that exam confident about the images they've stored in their memory.
There's actually even more to it than that. The system is planned to be a forerunner of a structure that can be described as "self-adaptive testing." In this mode, questions accumulate a weighting function along the spectrum of hard-to-easy based on the percentage of responses in which they are answered correctly or incorrectly. That score value will also be stratified by properties of the log-on which can request the use's level of subject experience. Then when the student gets an error, the next question asked will have an "easier" weighting value. This implies that no two quizzes will ever be the same. It also means that quizzes are actually an integral part of the learning process. Quizzes them become part of the process of course development like any cybernetic system - continuous feedback to the student; continuous feedback to the teacher so that the parts of the curriculum causing difficulty can be flagged and re-presented. For the teacher this could lead to better curriculum delivery; for the student, a more evenly distributed learning experience without the ritual anxiety of not knowing whether you're ready to take the final. And much of this project evolved from a Yale student's project in a multimedia center - the influence of a student on her or his own education. This same educational influence will occur with the help of these interactive quizzes.
Project Principals and email addresses:
Center for Advanced Instructional Media: <http://info.med.yale.edu/caim> phone: 737-5026