Dr. Sarah Douglas, MSU Human Development and Family Studies associate professor, is the co-principal investigator for a new grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a learning-based framework using sensor technology that can guide teachers in making behavior intervention decisions to support children with peer engagement deficits.
“Teachers need innovative ways to help measure child social engagement to better inform instructional practices,” she said. “By teaming up with engineers we are able to deliver state of the art solutions and improve child social outcomes.”
Dr. Douglas will work with Dr. Subir Biswas from the MSU College of Engineering, the principal investigator for the grant.
Children with a wide variety of disabilities have social engagement challenges, but schools often struggle to address these social needs even though it is clear they are critical for later post-school and life success.
“Existing tools to measure child social engagement are inefficient for teachers and take away from instructional time,” Dr. Sarah Douglas said. “An automated tool would allow teachers to focus on instruction and accelerate child social engagement and learning.”
The basic idea is that each child wears a sensor in the class, and the sensors ping off of each other.
“The sensors would tell the teacher who the child's near, who initiates into an interaction, who's leaving an interaction,” she explained. “It can even tell you a child's activity levels, measure vocalization, and potentially also differentiate between children who are screaming versus children who are having real conversations. So, it's designed to take away the obligation of the teacher to always be observing this child with autism or other social engagement challenges when they have all these other things to do and children to also observe in the classroom.”
The sensor provides data to teachers so that they can understand the nuances of children’s interactions so that they can make educational decisions to help support the children’s growth areas.
“What things are the child struggling with the most? For example, you might be thinking they never know how to start an interaction, but the data will show the child can start an interaction, but they just don't know how to maintain it. And it can be used with all students too – perhaps a group of students are spending a lot of time at the art table, so a teacher then knows to come up with more art activities based on their interests. So, the idea is the data comes to them and then they can make instructional based decisions.”
This phase of the research is scheduled to take three years. The first part of the project will include development of the sensor technology and output of data to teachers. The team will utilize a series of focus groups to develop and refine the teacher data output.
“In the final year we will use a convergent parallel mixed method design to evaluate the usability, feasibility, and social validity of the sensor system,” Dr. Douglas said. “I think has a lot of potential, but again, it's one of those that's kind of, you know, many years in the making until I think it's a tool that can be used in classrooms across the US.”
To learn more about the MSU Department of Human Development and Family Studies, visit hdfs.msu.edu.
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By Katie Rose Frey
