MASCOT: A Mobile Application for Students’ Complexity of Thinking
Principal Supervisors

Dr. WU Jun Vivian
(Office of University General Education)

Duration

1 year and 2 months

Approved Budget

HK $99,650

 
  • Abstract
  • Brief write-up
  • Video Report

Abstract

  • The General Education Foundation (GEF) Programme is a common core for all CUHK undergraduates. One of its missions is to promote students’ academic preparedness, including their cognitive ability and critical thinking skills, and hence students’ smooth transition from secondary to university education.
  • In 2014, we saw the need to understand more about students’ thinking complexity and measure their improvement in thinking. By applying the Narrative Qualitative Assessment (NQA) method, a group of GEF teachers analyzed students’ writings and identified that most undergraduates (mostly year 1 and 2) retained at a preliminary level of thinking complexity in a way that, for example, they failed to identify uncertainties in an open-end question and always looked for a standard answer to the problem.1
  • Based upon the aforementioned findings, this project is proposed to address students’ such learning needs, namely, to improve their awareness of turning from an answer-driven thinking approach to a more sophisticated one, which is useful for addressing complicated open-ended questions often encountered in university education. An interactive mobile application (e.g. an App) will be developed for users to know their thinking patterns and obtain immediate suggestions on future improvement. Such a mobile application, as a way of supporting student learning in the online environment and beyond, will be particularly useful for students to know themselves without necessity to meet the teacher face-to-face.
  • To achieve the purpose, the App consists of two key components, a set of scenario-based questions to collect students’ self-evaluation on their thinking complexity and five feedback videos corresponding to the five thinking complexity levels. Based on their answer to these scenario-based questions, users of the App will be directed to one of these feedback videos, which provides a summary of their thinking complexity patterns and actionable suggestions. For students, these questions can stimulate self-awareness of their own thinking habits; suggestions in the feedback can provide directions for future improvement. For teachers, data from students’ self-evaluation, when combined with the NQA study on students’ writings, can directly inform the classroom teaching.
  • 1 The findings have been reported and published in the Teaching & Learning Innovation EXPO 2017, and the full report was published to the Association of Core Texts and Courses in 2017 Fall.