차별화교수지원 스마트툴의 설계 및 개발 연구

Abstract

This study presents the design of a new smart-tool to facilitate Differentiated Instruction (DI) practice and develops prototypes to evaluate the tool. In particular, a User-Centered Design (UCD) process was adopted to develop the smart-tool for an optimal User eXperience (UX). As the first step of the UCD process, user’s needs and system requirements were analyzed by conducting interviews with teachers and community members. The analysis of the interview data revealed three aspects: activity system about DI practice, facilitating factors, and conflicting factors in practicing DI. The activity system helped to understand DI practice in Korean primary school environments. The facilitating factors provided insights into how best to promote DI practice among teachers. Finally, the conflicting factors revealed the barriers Korean primary teachers face in implementing DI. In the second step of the UCD process, scenarios were developed based on the findings to describe alternative conceptual designs within the user’s contexts and to envision the future use possibilities of the newly designed tool. Then, the system features and technologies to be applied to the new tool designed in this study were defined from the personas and scenarios. To summarize, the features of the conceptualdesigns were linked with 32 conflicting factors and 13 facilitating factors as well as common aspects from a review of teacher’s tools for DI practice. The approach was based on the assumption that if the problems with some conflicts were solved and facilitating factors were given on the newly developed tool, teachers might be more encouraged to use DI practice. Then, as the third and fourth step of the UCD process, physical designs including a low-fidelity prototype and a high-fidelity prototype were implemented. Three rounds of evaluation with the interactive designs were conducted to validate the requirements analysis and to finalize the conceptual designs and tools for supporting teachers and facilitating DI practice. Each of the three rounds of evaluation had a different purpose. The first evaluation explored the new conceptual designs and examined the feasibility of the new tool by reviewing the scenario with real users. The second evaluation investigated the efficacy of the design features and made decisions concerning the alternatives using formative evaluation by evaluating the low-fidelity prototype. The final evaluation measured user performance and optimal User eXperience (UX) by eliminating the usability problems revealed by the summative evaluation and by evaluating the high-fidelity prototype. Through three rounds of evaluation, the conceptual designs as well as the physical designs were revised to become more user-centered. From the findings of the first evaluation, a new scene and new detailed accidents in the existing scenes of the scenario were modified and supplemented. For example, the scenes about students with ADHD and multi-cultural family backgrounds were augmented, reflecting real activities and contexts. In the second evaluation, decisions on the features were made by analyzing the discussions of the seven claims. The final evaluation helped to evaluate the performance of the tool and overall satisfaction in terms of UX. The final results were both the scenarios as a representation of the final conceptual design and a smart-phone application prototype as an example physical device. In summary, this study has a number of practical implications for DI practice at Korean primary schools, which reinforces the importance of field-testing designs in addition to following best practices. This empirical study helped to establish a better understanding of the barriers teachers face in implementing DI in their current teaching and learning environment. Furthermore, as a small effort to solve the problems at Korean primary schools in terms of DI practice, this study suggests a new smart-tool to facilitate teacher’s DI practice. This study also provides guidelines and crucial considerations about applying smart-technologies in education such as personal information security, private protection, and accuracy of pushing information from the user’s perspective grounded in empirical data. Furthermore, the final smart-application suggests an innovative teacher’s tool to supplement a lack of implementation of DI on smart-device.