mmu | cerlim

The eMapps.com Project Evaluation - A Workbook for Teachers

Overview

This workbook will provide teachers taking part in the eMapps.com project with links to a common set of tools including background information, forms and questionnaires which will help us to understand and evaluate what the project as a whole has achieved. The workbook has been prepared by two of the project partners, CERLIM, the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management, based at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and EUN, the European Schoolnet Partnership based in Brussels, Belgium. Our joint evaluation activities are explained in the following section.

If you have any queries about the workbook or the evaluation, your point of contact is Margaret Markland, Research Associate at CERLIM.

Purpose of the Evaluation

The purpose of our evaluation activities is to assess the impact that the eMapps game has had on its intended users, both teachers and children, and on the school in general. We hope to find out how and what the children learn when playing the game, and in what ways that learning is similar to or different from their more usual classroom learning experiences, and how eMapps supports wider changes in school. We hope to answer questions about your own learning processes and experiences as teachers defining and preparing your game using the new mobile technologies. We would like you to tell us what you intend the children to learn, whether they achieved these learning outcomes, and whether you identified other unexpected learning outcomes. We will ask you to gather feedback from the children as they reflect on what they learned by playing the eMapps game, so that we can compare their experiences with your own. We also want to identify any barriers to effective learning revealed by project-sponsored activities.

Our thinking will in part be formed by the pedagogical framework on which eMapps.com is based. You will find this in Project Deliverable D1, which is on the eMapps.com website. This will help us understand what has changed in the way in which teachers teach and learners learn when designing and interacting with the eMapps.com game.

There are always many factors at work in addition to those directly caused by the project itself, so if we want to know whether the project has had an impact on the learning experiences of the children we will need to find ways to isolate as far as possible the project's effects from others. We also have to accept that it is rarely possible to have a true control group (i.e. a second group of people who were not exposed to the project but were otherwise exposed to identical variables).

The Evaluation has five distinct sections:

• Section 1; Defining the aims and learning objectives of each separate learning activity ¹

• Section 2; Formal assessment of the games from the teachers’ perspectives

• Section 3; Formal assessment of the games from the children’s perspectives

• Section 4; Conclusion: a comparison of the teacher and child experience

• Section 5; Making the game easier for the children to play

¹ ‘Learning activities’ are defined in this document as the equivalent of ‘lessons’. They have intended learning outcomes which can be defined explicitly. In this sense a ‘learning activity’ may include a series of tasks, but they are linked together in a logical manner and have interdependencies i.e. the activity is designed. eMapps.com will be capable of supporting a large number of different kinds of learning activity.