About LOOPS
The National Science Foundation has awarded the Concord Consortium a grant for a new five-year project, Logging Opportunities in Online Programs for Science (LOOPS).
LOOPS is a national program that uses the cyber infrastructure to provide innovative resources that support inquiry in the middle school science classroom. The project makes innovative use of technology to create timely, valid, and actionable reports to teachers by analyzing assessments and logs of student actions generated in the course of using online curriculum materials. The reports allow teachers to make data-based decisions about alternative teaching strategies.
LOOPS will collect data on student progress—what activity each student is working on or has completed, plus student responses to questions and scores on various explicit assessments. The major innovation of LOOPS will be data on student inquiry skills obtained by monitoring how students learn from their explorations of models and probes. LOOPS will extract in real time a few key indicators of inquiry skills and present them in a format that teachers can use.
LOOPS will put teachers in a feedback loop of data, which will help inform their choice of assessments, actions, and curriculum customizations. These feedback loops will be classroom-tested with inquiry-based materials using probes and models focused on eighth grade physical science.
The LOOPS project is part of a long-term collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Toronto, and North Carolina Central University
