Bracelets measure student engagement in the classroom
Jun 12, 2012, 1:10 PM | Updated: 4:16 pm
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is hoping a bracelet can help improve our schools.
The bracelets track how much a student is sweating. As Clemson researcher Shaundra Daily explains, it’s something that happens anytime you are excited, have a deep thought, or emotion.
“These skin conductance sensors that we have, this is what people have been calling the bracelet, it picks up on how much you’re sweating,” Daily says.
Ideally, the information would be combined with video or annotated notes by the teacher of what was happening in the classroom throughout the school day.
“You don’t just come in and have a technology that says ‘Here’s where kids are engaged,’ without that context. So, the teacher informing this is very important,” says Daily.
Clemson has a group of junior high school students who will be wearing the bracelets over the next year to see if they could be an effective tool in helping teachers discover the best strategies for keeping kids engaged.
The grants are in addition to a larger effort by the Gates Foundation called “Measures of Effective Teaching” or MET.
They have enrolled 3,000 teachers from seven different school districts to help them test new ways of gauging the effectiveness of teachers.
The Gates Foundation is spending more than a million dollars to fund research at Clemson University and The National Center on Time and Learning.
