Educational Standard Correlation Services for Digital Libraries Holly Devaul Jonathan Ostwald John Weatherley Digital Learning Sciences UCAR Anne Diekema Jennifer Bailey CNLP Syracuse University

Presentation Overview We will discuss a suite of educational standards assignment and alignment services that support cataloging and discovery of educational standards information in the NSDL – First half - how these services work, scenarios for use, and expected performance levels based on recent evaluations – Second half - more technical in nature; aimed at software engineers and web developers focusing on how the APIs work

CASAA- Computer Assisted Standards Assignment and Alignment NSF NSDL Service project with two goals Support the assignment of standards to learning resources – Content Assignment Tool (CAT) Provide a cross-walk between the different state and national standards – Standards Alignment Tool (SAT)

Motivation No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) Teachers must document how their teaching is aligned to standards States required to develop assessments that evaluate student achievement relative to standards Teachers want access to standards information for accountability reporting Opportunity for digital libraries to provide this service

Content Assignment Tool (CAT) Natural Language Processing technology assesses resource content, suggests relevant educational content standards Semi-automatic approach – CAT suggests relevant standards to the user – User makes final determination System learns from vetted assignments Web tool plus REST API for easy integration with other applications

Web-based access to CAT User name- guest Password- p

Integration with the Digital Collection System (DCS) Accesses resource content via URL Utilizes data from catalog record -url, grade level -description, keywords (optional) Is configured to query only NSES

Suggestions provided in context of cataloging

Visual cues help track suggested and human selected standards – human makes final decision on what to assign Standards Selected Suggestion Selected but not suggested Suggestion

CAT Evaluation Compared human-assigned NSES standards to CAT suggested standards Research questions: – Does the CAT Service return standards that a human would choose for assignment? – Do the standards human catalogers have chosen occur near the top of the ranked list of CAT Service suggestions? – Does the inclusion of metadata improve standards assignment via the CAT Service?

National Science Education Standards (NSES) Hierarchical in structure, classified by grade band and content area and can be grouped as follows: – inquiry - (nature of science; Standard A) – subject - (life, physical, Earth and space science; Standards B, C and D) – applied - (science and technology, personal and social perspectives, and the history and nature of science; Standards E, F, and G).

Does the CAT Service return standards that a human would choose for assignment? CAT Service suggestions include 28-51% of the standards humans assigned This offers a time savings in the initial assignment of the standards by presenting the cataloger a smaller subset of standards to choose from, that includes a substantial number of the preferred standards.

Do the standards human catalogers have chosen occur near the top of the ranked list of CAT Service suggestions? Analysis was conducted to assess the placement of the human-assigned standards in the ranked list of suggestions from CAT If metadata included, 83% of the standards suggested at rank 1 were also chosen by a human; then drops off quickly Subject standards performed better than applied or inquiry We speculate that the language used in the resource corresponds better with subject standards than with applied or inquiry which require more subjective interpretation

Does the inclusion of metadata improve standards assignment via the CAT Service? YES- if no metadata included, 60% of the standards at rank 1 were also chosen by a human In addition, including metadata expands the utility of this tool to suggest standards for non-text-based resources that have descriptive metadata associated with them See technical paper for full details of this analysis

Standards Alignment Tool (SAT) Dynamic automatic correlation of standards Combination of various algorithms to find equivalent (correlated) standards Allows great flexibility for indexing and search Takes standard text or ASN standard PURL REST API for easy integration with other applications/systems

Web-based access to SAT User name- guest Password- p

SAT-DLESE Discovery integration Testbed collection with NSES standards cataloged at 4 th level Select state of interest to view corresponding state standards side-by-side Proof-of-concept for technical integration; alignments not yet vetted

State standards are displayed side-by-side national standards

SAT Evaluation Looked at NSES to state mapping for five states (OH, MA, MN, CO, NY) NSES standards distributed proportionately across inquiry, subject and applied subgroups and across grade level (n=49) Queried SAT for state alignment to NSES Evaluated first 5 suggestions for each standard (strong, moderate, weak correlation) or none at all

Preliminary analysis Issues – Lack of equivalent state standards – Differing granularity of scope of content A mechanism to better discriminate no match and multiple matches is needed For this alignment (NSES-state) human mediation is still necessary (as with CAT) Other alignment pathways (state-to-state) need to be evaluated to get the full picture Additional machine learning may improve results

Part Two – The Technical Bits Aimed at software engineers and web developers who wish to utilize the API’s and integrate CAT and SAT functionalities with existing applications

CAT API in DCS: Topics CAT / DCS Interaction The Educational Standards Hierarchy API call: suggestedStandards Constraining the search for suggestions Other uses of API in DCS RPC vs REST Services

DCS Communicates with CAT via Web Service

Selectable / Suggested Standards are leaf nodes Leaf Standards Hierarchy

suggestStandards request CAT search for suggestions guided by info supplied to the API Returns StandardsList suggested by the CAT Service ASN Identifier Benchmark

Constraining Suggestions author – (NSES) topic – (Science) maxResults – (10) startGrade endGrade keywords – Description – (weighted) keywords

REST Representational State Transfer

CAT Service Response

CAT API Requests suggestStandards – Suggests aligned standards for a specific lesson plan saveStandards – Save standards to a specific assignment getStandard – Retrieve the details for a specified standard getStandards – Retrieve the details for a specified list of standards

CAT API Requests (continued…) removeStandards – Remove standards from a specific assignment getAssignments – Retrieve the standards for a specific assignment getAllAssignments – Retrieve all assignments (including the standards for each assignment) for a specified user getAuthors – Retrieve all assignments (including the standards for each assignment) for a specified user getTopics – Retrieve a list of all topics available in CAT

SAT Service: Topics DLESE use case: Display state standards that are aligned to NSES API call: suggestedStandards Displaying the suggested standards in the DLESE interface SAT API overview Development tips

DLESE Request for State Standards User selects a state in the DLESE UI DLESE provides ASN identifiers for NSES standards – suggestStandards request accepts ASN identifiers or text SAT returns a list of suggested standards as XML – Response contains text suitable for display in the UI DLESE UI displays the standards to the user

DLESE Communicates with SAT via Web Service

NSES Standards Supplied by DLESE, State Standards Returned by SAT NSES standards supplied by DLESE as ASN Ids State standards returned by SAT service as text

suggestStandards request One or multiple standards can be supplied in the request Multiple standards handled one of two ways: – Combine the text of all the standards into a single query and return a single result set - or - – A query for each standard and return as many result sets as there are standards DLESE used the latter – DLESE has multiple standards cataloged for each resource – Display best match for each standard Supply grade range to refine results

SAT suggestStandards Response

DLESE Display State standards displayed side-by-side with NSES standards When a state is selected by the user, request is made asynchronously using AJAX – Provides time for SAT to respond and gives the user feedback with a spinner graphic Selected state is remembered throughout the user’s session

SAT API Requests suggestStandards – Suggests aligned standards for specific standard saveStandards – Save standards to a specific assignment removeStandards – Remove standards from a specific assignment getAssignments – Retrieve the standards for a specific assignment getAllAssignments - Retrieve all assignments (including the standards for each assignment) for a specified user

SAT API Requests (continued…) getAuthors - Retrieve a list of all authors (states) available in SAT getTopics - Retrieve a list of all topics available in SAT getStandard - Retrieve the details for a specified standard getStandards - Retrieve the details for a specified list of standards

Development Tips Use AJAX to retrieve and display standards at point of request Retrieve and cache standards alignments ahead of time if needed Use JSP/PHP to retrieve and display the results in a Web setting

REST Service URLs CAT SAT

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