Statement of Audience and Impact on Design
Audience Description
SpiderAsks is designed for high school to college-level students, especially in China, aiming to enhance their English writing skills, particularly those preparing for standardized exams like the IELTS. These learners are typically self-motivated, seeking immediate feedback, and favor self-directed learning environments. Additionally, the platform serves educators who wish to incorporate technology into their teaching methodologies to improve student outcomes. The targeted audience for this platform is from low- to middle-income families who cannot afford expensive, quality one-on-one tutoring for writing tasks. As a result, learners often have to rely on little to no feedback from expert teachers or native speakers of English to help improve their writing. While some may have access to generative AI, its capabilities might be limited to correcting grammar and improving wording without providing comprehensive feedback on overall improvements due to the lack of effective prompting. According to IELTS official reports, writing is the lowest-scoring section of the test for all test-takers compared with listening, speaking, and reading (IELTS, n.d.).
Impact on Design
Understanding the diverse needs and characteristics of the target audience was pivotal in shaping SpiderAsks’ design. High school and college students preparing for standardized tests value immediate, actionable feedback and intuitive interfaces, which led to the integration of AI-driven feedback mechanisms and an interactive web design. Ensuring accessibility across various devices made the platform versatile and user-friendly, accommodating the technological preferences of a broad demographic.
Promoting Equity Through AI
A fundamental design objective was to leverage AI to democratize access to expert-level feedback. Traditional high-quality tutoring can be expensive, limiting access for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. By utilizing AI for feedback, SpiderAsasks provides all students, regardless of financial means, the opportunity to receive detailed, expert-level critiques of their essays. This feature significantly promotes equity by ensuring that quality educational support is accessible to a wider range of students, thereby leveling the playing field and enabling more equitable learning outcomes.
Furthermore, the inclusion of a cartoonish spider character was a deliberate choice to mitigate the intimidation often associated with writing tasks. This design element fosters a psychologically safe learning environment, encouraging students to engage more confidently with their writing practice.
Learning Outcomes
SpiderAsasks aims to achieve the following learning outcomes:
1. Improved Writing Scores: Enhance performance in standardized writing tasks.
2. Understanding of Rubrics: Provide comprehensive knowledge of evaluation criteria.
3. Familiarity with Different Task Types: Enable effective navigation of various writing prompts.
4. Enhanced Grammar and Vocabulary Accuracy: Improve linguistic precision in writing.
5. Increased Self-Competency and Autonomy: Foster greater confidence and independence in self-directed learning.
6. Positive User Satisfaction and Experience: Achieve high levels of engagement and satisfaction with the learning process.
I used the Backward Design model (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) in designing the platform. By starting with identifying the desired results, SpiderAsasks ensures that every feature and activity directly contributes to the achievement of these specific learning outcomes. This alignment ensures that all instructional strategies and assessments are purposefully designed to achieve the desired end results. Next, I determined the acceptable evidence of student understanding and proficiency, adopting the assessor’s perspective before designing the exercises and feedback mechanisms. Finally, our feedback framework and prompts are designed to help students accomplish the desired results.
Instructional Process and Learning Theories
Instructional Process
SpiderAsasks employs a comprehensive and flexible instructional process designed to cater to both self-directed learners and educators, ensuring a personalized and effective learning experience for each user.
For Self-Learners
The journey begins with a diagnostic test, which serves as an initial assessment to gauge the student’s current proficiency in English writing. This diagnostic phase is crucial as it identifies the learner’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing the platform to tailor subsequent learning activities to their specific needs. Following the diagnostic test, students are guided into personalized practice sessions. These sessions are meticulously categorized by both topic and question type (e.g., argumentation, descriptive writing), enabling learners to focus on areas that require the most attention.
Throughout this process, immediate AI-driven feedback plays a pivotal role. As students submit their essays, the AI analyzes their work in real-time, providing detailed critiques on various aspects such as grammar, vocabulary usage, coherence, and adherence to rubrics. This instant feedback loop facilitates iterative improvement, allowing students to understand their mistakes, learn from them, and apply corrections promptly. Additionally, the platform offers sample revisions and model essays to illustrate effective writing techniques, further enhancing the learning experience.
Moreover, students have the option to choose their learning paths. They can either continue practicing specific topics, engage with different question types, or enroll in specialized courses offered on the website. This flexibility supports varied learning styles and paces, ensuring that each student can navigate their learning journey in a manner that best suits their individual preferences and goals.
For Educators
Educators can harness the platform’s capabilities to augment their teaching strategies and provide targeted support to their students. Teachers can assign timed writing tasks that simulate the actual exam environment, helping students become accustomed to the pressures and time constraints of the IELTS exam. These tasks are designed to mirror real-world exam conditions, thereby enhancing students’ test-taking skills and reducing anxiety related to time management. The platform’s downloadable feedback feature allows teachers to access comprehensive reports on each student’s performance. These reports include detailed analyses of common errors, progress over time, and areas needing improvement.
With this data, educators can monitor student progress effectively and identify trends or recurring issues within the class. This enables them to focus instructional efforts on specific areas where students are struggling, ensuring that teaching is both data-driven and personalized. By providing these tools, SpiderAsasks empowers educators to deliver more effective and personalized instruction, ultimately enhancing the overall learning experience for their students.
Guiding Learning Theories
Cognitive Apprenticeship
Immediate, detailed feedback is central to SpiderAsasks, aligning with Cognitive Apprenticeship principles (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 2018), which highlight a cognitive approach to writing. Cognitive Apprenticeship suggests that writers often need to develop complex control structures to manage the various components of composing high-quality text. When providing feedback in a learning context, it is important for educators to model their own thinking processes to students. This includes demonstrating struggles and reflective operations involved in writing, which can help alter students’ understanding of writing from being linear to an iterative process. Furthermore, feedback involves guiding students through planning and revising their work. The structured form of feedback, akin to procedural facilitation, aids students by suggesting specific lines of thinking and simplifying the process of reconsidering and elaborating on their writing plans. The goal is to foster a sophisticated writing strategy through modeling, coaching, scaffolding, and eventually fading support, allowing students to internalize these methods. By providing timely and specific feedback, the platform supports the scaffolding of student learning, enabling learners to make informed adjustments to their writing strategies. This iterative feedback loop is crucial for skill development in writing, where continuous improvement is essential.
Self-Determination Theory (SDT)
Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2012) emphasizes the importance of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in fostering intrinsic motivation. SpiderAsasks fosters autonomy by allowing students to choose their learning paths and practice at their own pace. The visualized dashboard enhances competence by tracking progress, while the interactive and personalized design supports relatedness, making the learning experience more engaging and motivating. Autonomy-supportive environments help learners to internalize motivation more fully. This leads to better engagement and deeper conceptual understanding. When students are allowed to engage in learning out of personal interest or a sense of choice, they are more likely to internalize the reasons for learning, which enhances their overall engagement and comprehension. Intrinsically motivated learners engage in activities for their own sake, deriving satisfaction from the process rather than external rewards. This kind of motivation is supported when individuals have a sense of autonomy in their learning environment.
Cognitive Load Theory
Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 1988) suggests that instructional design should optimize cognitive resources by minimizing unnecessary mental effort. SpiderAsasks is designed with minimal extraneous cognitive load, presenting information in a clear and organized manner. Sweller (1988) suggests that by reducing the cognitive load associated with problem-solving search activities, particularly those involved in means-ends analysis, we can free up cognitive resources that are critical for learning. This can enhance the acquisition of knowledge structures or schemas, which are essential for expertise in problem-solving. SpiderAsasks organizes all relevant information about grammatical usage and dictionary information in one place, largely reducing the extraneous cognitive load on search for such information before reviewing the feedback. The use of visual and animated elements helps manage intrinsic cognitive load, allowing learners to focus on mastering writing skills without being overwhelmed by the interface.
Media Used and Rationale Behind Choices
Interactive Web Design
The choice of an interactive web platform stems from the need for accessibility and user engagement. Unlike traditional paper-based methods, a web-based interface allows for dynamic interactions, real-time feedback, and adaptability across devices. This decision is supported by Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning (Walsh, 2017), which emphasize the effectiveness of multimedia elements in enhancing learning by catering to different learning modalities and maintaining learner engagement.
AI-Driven Feedback and Exercises
Incorporating AI for immediate feedback addresses the common issue of delayed instructor responses, thereby facilitating continuous improvement. This aligns with the findings from “Learning is Misunderstood” (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014), which emphasize that retrieval practice is a more effective learning strategy than passive review methods like rereading. Immediate feedback and quizzes from AI systems can function similarly to quizzes that facilitate active retrieval, helping learners to reinforce and consolidate knowledge. AI can provide immediate feedback to show learners what they know and don’t know, guiding them to focus on areas needing improvement. This aligns with the idea that testing helps learners identify weaknesses in their understanding, thereby calibrating their learning process. Learning is stronger when abstract concepts are made concrete and relevant (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014). AI can adaptively present feedback and examples that relate directly to the learner’s context, helping to personalize and deepen their understanding. Immediate feedback helps learners efficiently allocate their study time by avoiding ineffective strategies such as repetitive rereading.
Visual and Animated Elements
To make the platform more engaging and less intimidating, visual and animated elements are integrated into the UI/UX design. While visual elements like colors, typography, and layout are important, UI/UX design is more about creating an overall product experience. This includes all touchpoints of user interaction, ensuring a cohesive and engaging journey, as informed by Human-Centered Design principles (Thomsen, 2013). By incorporating playful and friendly visual elements, the platform reduces anxiety associated with writing tasks, thereby supporting a positive emotional climate conducive to learning.
Responsive Design
Ensuring compatibility across mobile devices, tablets, and desktops maximizes accessibility, accommodating users’ varying technological preferences and contexts. This decision reflects the necessity of designing for diverse learners, as discussed in “Designing for Diverse Learners” (Gronseth, Michela, & Ugwu, 2021), ensuring equitable access to learning resources. The responsive design also supports the goal of making SpiderAsasks accessible to users in different countries, including China, by providing a seamless experience across various devices.
Equitable Access Through AI
By leveraging AI to provide high-quality, expert-level feedback, SpiderAsasks ensures that all students, regardless of their financial background, have access to valuable learning resources. This design choice not only enhances learning outcomes but also promotes equity by removing financial barriers, enabling a wider range of students to benefit from personalized, high-quality educational support.
Platform Description
SpiderAsasks is hosted on a scalable online cloud server, chosen for its affordability, stability, and global accessibility, particularly targeting users in China. Cloud hosting ensures that the platform can handle varying user loads, provide reliable uptime, and offer data security, which are critical for maintaining user trust and ensuring continuous access to learning materials.
Technological Stack:
• Backend: Python Flask framework facilitates rapid development and flexibility.
• Database: SQLite offers a lightweight, easily maintainable solution suitable for initial development stages.
• Frontend: HTML, Bootstrap, and Jinja2 ensure a responsive and visually appealing user interface.
• AI Integration: OpenAI API enables sophisticated, accurate feedback mechanisms, enhancing the platform’s instructional efficacy.
The choice of a cloud-based platform also aligns with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, ensuring that the platform is accessible to all users regardless of their location or device.
Assessment of Learning Outcomes
Direct Assessment:
• Performance Metrics: Improvement in IELTS writing scores is tracked through the platform’s diagnostic and practice tests. The visualized dashboard provides both numerical scores and graphical representations of progress, offering clear evidence of learning gains.
• Task Completion Rates: Monitoring the frequency and consistency of task completions helps assess student engagement and sustained effort.
Indirect Assessment:
• User Surveys: Periodic surveys gauge students’ understanding of writing concepts and their confidence levels. These surveys provide qualitative data on user satisfaction and perceived learning effectiveness.
• User Experience Feedback: Collecting feedback on the platform’s usability and design elements informs continuous improvements, ensuring that the learning environment remains supportive and engaging.
Alignment with Learning Theories
The assessment strategies employed by SpiderAsasks are grounded in Authentic Assessment principles (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 2018). By immersing students in practical scenarios, evaluations help them internalize useful conceptual models and cognitive processes necessary for expert thinking. By simulating actual IELTS writing tasks and providing actionable feedback, the platform ensures that assessments are meaningful and directly related to the learners’ goals.
Additionally, the use of progress tracking and user satisfaction surveys aligns with Formative Assessment practices, enabling ongoing adjustments to instructional strategies based on real-time data (Fisher & Bandy, 2019). This iterative feedback loop supports continuous improvement and ensures that the platform remains responsive to learners’ needs.
Promoting Equity in Assessment
By providing accessible, AI-driven feedback, SpiderAsasks ensures that all students have the opportunity to receive high-quality assessments regardless of their financial means. This promotes equity by allowing students from diverse backgrounds to benefit from detailed feedback that would otherwise require expensive tutoring services.
Iterative Design Improvements Based on HPL TutorBot Comparative Analysis
Through a comprehensive analysis of various AI educational agents, particularly the HPL Tutorbot, valuable insights were gained that directly influenced the design enhancements of SpiderAsasks. This comparative evaluation underscored several critical areas for improvement, which have been meticulously integrated into the SpiderAsasks platform to enhance its efficacy and user experience.
Enhanced Feedback Mechanisms
The analysis revealed that while some AI tutors provided balanced feedback, they often lacked actionable suggestions and model revisions. Learning from this, SpiderAsasks incorporates detailed, example-driven feedback that not only highlights areas for improvement but also provides sample revisions. This ensures that students receive clear, tangible guidance to refine their writing skills effectively.
Improved Emotional Responsiveness
The HPL Tutorbot analysis highlighted gaps in emotional engagement and support. To address this, SpiderAsasks has integrated empathetic feedback strategies that validate students’ emotional experiences and provide motivational support. This enhancement fosters a more supportive learning environment, encouraging students to engage confidently with writing tasks without fear of judgment.
Increased Practical Application and Scaffolding
It was observed that some AI tutors lacked sufficient scaffolding for complex tasks, limiting their practical applicability. In response, SpiderAsasks has implemented structured learning paths that gradually increase in complexity, aligning with Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky, 1978). This ensures that learners can build foundational skills before tackling more advanced writing challenges, facilitating a smoother and more effective learning progression.
Adaptive Learning Pathways
Recognizing the importance of personalized learning experiences, informed by the limitations observed in HPL Tutorbot, SpiderAsasks employs adaptive algorithms to tailor content delivery based on individual learner progress and preferences. This ensures that each student receives a customized learning experience that addresses their unique strengths and weaknesses, thereby maximizing learning outcomes.
Strengthened Data Privacy and Ethical Design
The analysis emphasized the necessity of robust data privacy measures and ethical design practices. Informed by these findings, SpiderAsasks prioritizes data security through encryption and anonymization techniques, ensuring user information is protected. Additionally, the platform maintains transparency in data usage, fostering trust and compliance with ethical standards.
These iterative design improvements, inspired by the HPL Tutorbot analysis, have significantly enhanced SpiderAsasks’ ability to provide a comprehensive, supportive, and effective learning environment for ESL students preparing for standardized exams.
Conclusion
SpiderAsasks exemplifies a well-designed educational technology tool that integrates key instructional design principles and learning theories to support ESL learners in their pursuit of academic excellence. By addressing the specific needs of its target audience, leveraging interactive and AI-driven media, and implementing robust assessment strategies, SpiderAsasks not only facilitates immediate improvements in writing skills but also fosters long-term learner autonomy and confidence.
The incorporation of insights from the HPL Tutorbot comparative analysis further strengthens the platform, ensuring it delivers empathetic, actionable, and personalized learning experiences. By making expert-level feedback accessible to all students without the high costs of tutoring, SpiderAsasks promotes educational equity, ensuring that a wider range of students can achieve their academic goals.
This alignment with the T127 course’s emphasis on learner-centered design, cognitive load management, and equitable access underscores SpiderAsasks’ potential to make a significant impact in the realm of standardized English language assessment preparation. Through continuous iterative improvements and a steadfast commitment to inclusive design, SpiderAsasks stands as a model for effective and equitable educational technology solutions.
NB: ChatGPT is used to improve the writing and style of this analysis.
References
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