VMTWiki: MeetingFourtyFour

SAT Chat
- There will be a session tonight. Alan, Murat and Johann will be moderating.
- We should add time-zone information to the registration page to help potential international participants.

Incorporating emails
- Is encryption an alternative?
- According to the current protocol with IRB, we can store emails at our server, but no one should be able to see it. We can store up to 80 emails. So far we didn’t have more than 50 participants in all our past sessions, so this is not a problem at this moment.
- This can be used for a reminder service, which is also important for us. In order to do something extra with the email list, we might have to revise the protocol.
- For instance, conducting one on one interviews with participants is a more complicated process. Consent forms need to be filled by parents in that case.
- We might direct them to a webpage via a general announcement. Filling out a web form will let users to send anonymous feedback to us. We can also ask about their screen name on the feedback form, so that we can match the feedback with the participant.
- Using a follow up interview, and providing a survey might be very useful. Maybe we should consider revising the protocol accordingly.
  - We should also consider providing an incentive for providing feedback. For instance, we could consider a small gift like a promotion code from toys r’us, amazon, or itunes. (Ilene will look into this)

Research
- Conversation Analysis seminar: Every participant identified their problem area to work on until the end of this quarter.
- Coding:
  - Fatos did some analysis on the previously coded chat transcripts. Documents of that analysis will be available on the wiki by this Friday.
  - Evaluation forms that we used for grading powwow sessions
    - Steve and Ian will be looking at the criteria and the grades previously assigned by Fatos.
    - Learning outcome: instead let’s use the terms math outcome. (since solving a math problem does not necessarily mean that the participant has really learned something.)
  - Coding calibration sessions for the math progress dimension – final one on Friday
  - Coding math progress corresponds to drawing a graphical representation. Since we need to consider a couple of utterances together while coding this dimension (instead of the single utterance approach we employed for previous dimensions), being able to see the graphical representation could really help us to visualize each group’s progress. We developed a small tool which can create such graphical representations in SVG format.
  - Next step in improving the coding scheme: math moves dimension. There is an overlap in between the math move and the problem solving dimensions. Math moves are rather low level, mechanical procedures whereas problem solving has a broader scope. We should keep discussing on how to define the math move dimension in a better way.
  - To put everything together: We should use grading and coded dimensions to compare a small number of chats. We should see whether interesting questions would emerge, or whether coding might reveal any interesting patterns etc.

An administrative change has recently happened at the Mathforum. This will not possibly affect the VMT group at this moment, but it might in the future.