I helped Carnegie Learning Institute improved its hinting system in eLearning. The results: the tool has been used by 1,400 schools in the U.S and raised student's math test scores in high-school and middle-school classrooms.

During the four-month internship, I conducted Contextual Inquiries on one of their current products (Cognitive Tutor) and performed Think Alouds on the paper prototype. At the end of the project, I provided a final report with design recommendations for the developing program. 

CONTEXTUAL INQUIRIES

In order to understand how middle school students solve computer-based math problems, I performed Contextual Inquiries on students while they used Cognitive Tutor. The study was set up in a classroom at Saltsburgh Middle School. I observed and interviewed six students working on three composite figure math problems and examined how they work in pairs to solve problems.

THINK ALOUDS 

Since Fire Quest Activity was in the half way of development, I decided to test it with Think Alouds. Think Alouds was used to evaluate the effectiveness of Fire Quest Activity from a novice standpoint. In this case, it was used to understand a student's problem solving process.

The usability testing helped me to understand the reasons behind each action that students took. For example, I learned how they decided on the shapes to select and how they calculated the area of each shape. At the beginning, I conducted Think Alouds on students individually and then followed an interview to collect their responses. The study was held at the Carnegie Learning office on April 22, and there were 6 students who attended the study.

More to update soon...