Dan Schwartz · Stanford School of Education
An unexpected place for HCI to improve education: Tests.

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Assessment is not a sexy topic. Tests are tolerated as a necessary nuisance. This underestimates the power of assessments, and the degree to which they have shaped how you, and everyone else, thinks about what counts as useful learning. Most assessments of learning focus on factual recall and procedural fluency. This misses the goal of education, which is to enable people to make good choices. Therefore, this is what assessments should measure. Current assessments employ a few well-worn scripts: multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, short answer, and so on. Choice-based assessments require new types of interactive environments that do not rely on the usual scripts. This is where HCI can help.

Daniel Schwartz is a Professor in Education and the Symbol Systems program at Stanford. After teaching in public schools for 8 years, Professor Schwartz completed a PhD to understand and improve instruction through the development of innovative technologies for learning and assessment. His graduate training included extensive work in computer and cognitive science. Professor Schwartz's research spans the high variability of everyday classrooms to the tightly controlled confines of fMRI (see AAALab.Stanford.Edu). His abiding question is how perception can facilitate understanding and learning.