$1.1 million-plus Gates grants: ‘Galvanic’ bracelets that measure student engagement
By Valerie Strauss , Washington Post | http://wapo.st/M0rxdT
1984 v. 3.0?
Please see update to this post by below
07:00 AM ET, 06/11/2012 :: In the ‘you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff’ category, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending about $1.1 million to develop a way to physiologically measure how engaged students are by their teachers’ lessons. This involves “galvanic skin response” bracelets that kids would wear so their engagement levels could be measured.
If this tells us anything, it is that the obsession with measurement and data in school reform has reached new nutty heights.
Here’s the description of the $498,055 grant to Clemson University that was awarded in November (but that just recently became widely known by Susan Ohanian and Diane Ravitch):
Purpose: to work with members of the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) team to measure engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers.
And here’s the description of the $621,265 grant given at the same time to the National Center on Time and Learning:
Purpose: to measure engagement physiologically with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Galvanic Skin Response to determine correlations between each measure and develop a scale that differentiates different degrees or levels of engagement.
That’s more than $1.1 million that could have been spent on things that schools actually need, such as books, teachers, librarians, etc.
The foundation gave the awards as part of its Measuring Effective Teachers project , which is experimenting with teacher evaluation systems in seven school districts nationwide. Millions of dollars have gone into these evaluation experiments, which, among other things, have involved the use of standardized test scores to assess teacher effectiveness (a bad idea), as well as the questionable videotaping of teachers. And now, bracelets.
Ohanian notes here that the kind of technology needed to develop galvanic bracelets is part of the “emerging field of neuromarketing,” which “relies on biometric technologies to determine a participant’s emotional and cognitive response to certain stimuli.”
How, Ravitch asks, would the bracelet tell if a student is responding to a teacher and not to something his friend whispers in his ear?
That’s just one of the questions that come to mind about this enterprise, including this one: Why would anybody spent money on this when some school systems can’t afford to pay their electric bills?
And: Is there not something a bit creepy about making kids wear something so their reactions to learning about the War of 1812 can be measured?
I have an idea: How about simply asking students what they thought about their teacher’s lesson on the Pythagorean theorem?
In this era of data-driven education, that just won’t do.
Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet.
| SKIN CONDUCTANCE/GALVANIC RESPONSE from Wikipedia Skin conductance measurement is one component of polygraph devices and is used in scientific research of emotional or physiological arousal. Many biofeedback therapy devices utilize skin conductance to measure and present an individual's stress response with the goal of helping the user to control their anxiety. The E-meter, which is used by the Church of Scientology, is a skin conductance measurement device. |
UPDATE: Gates changes Galvanic bracelet grant description: Foundation provides info on how website error occurred
By Valerie Strauss, Washington Post | http://wapo.st/M0s3sv
Update posted at 04:37 PM ET, 06/12/2012 :: Yesterday, I wrote about $1.1 million in grants that Bill Gates’s foundation made to develop bracelets that could measure how engaged students were in class. Today, the foundation said that one of the descriptions of the grants that I included in my post was actually wrong on its Web site and that it is fixing it.
A foundation spokesman said that the purpose of the $498,055 grant to Clemson University — which was awarded in November — is not related to teacher evaluation and that the Web site shouldn’t have said it was. Chris Williams, spokesman for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said in an e-mail that the original grant description was being fixed. He said mistakes are made “from time to time.”
In a later email he said the foundation staffer who writes grant descriptions for the website is usually not the program officer who writes the grant proposal and recommendation. The foundation is working to improve the process of writing about the grants, he said.
The original description of the Clemson grant said:
Purpose: to work with members of the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) team to measure engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers.
The new description of the grant’s purpose will say:
Purpose: to conduct a pilot study to measure student engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets, which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices more broadly to help students and teachers.
The description of the $621,265 grant given at the same time to the National Center on Time and Learning was accurate:
Purpose: to measure engagement physiologically with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Galvanic Skin Response to determine correlations between each measure and develop a scale that differentiates different degrees or levels of engagement.
Williams said that the foundation does not envision that a GSR monitoring device would become part of teacher evaluation. Responding to my question about how the project came to be developed, he said in an e-mail:
“The genesis of the project came in similar research done with autistic students, which found that they often were engaged in learning, even when it did not seem that they were from outward appearances.
“The pilot study will be small — some 100 students — and is still in the early stages of design. The foundation is funding, rather conducting this research, as part of its overall portfolio of grants designed to support promising research.”
No comments:
Post a Comment