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This Teacher Says No Thanks to the Galvanic Skin Response Bracelet

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2012 //
17

Readers of this blog are aware of the controversy surrounding the Gates-funded research into the uses of a device to monitor students’ and possibly teachers’ physiological reactions in the classroom. The device is called a “galvanic skin response” monitor. It would be a bracelet with wireless sensor that students would wear to measure how engaged or disengaged they are while in class. The Gates Foundation has spent $1.4 million to sponsor research on this project at Clemson, the National Commission on Time & Learning, and some other unnamed facility. The Clemson grant was described on the Gates website as part of the MET project, implying that it would be used to evaluate teachers, but the foundation said that was not correct and changed the description on the website.

There has been quite a lively discussion of this research on my blog, with a few people saying they welcomed the bracelet and the research and wanted to learn more about the physiological reactions of students, but most saying they thought this was a bad idea, for various reasons. I personally object to the Big Brother aspect of the project, as well as to the suggestion that “learning” can be measured by physiological reactions rather than by that yet-unmeasurable thing called understanding.

In a sign of the intelligence with which this project has been developed, the bracelet is referred to as “an engagement pedometer,” even though a pedometer measures steps and is not worn on the arm.

This is one teacher’s reaction. I liked it. I think you will too. Unless you are one of those who wants to measure students’ skin temperature and whatever emotional responses can be recorded on a bracelet.

As an experienced teacher who admires her students, I don’t need a bracelet to tell me when they are: bored, confused, excited, tired, interested, etc. I know them as individuals with strengths, weaknesses, aspirations and dreams. I find this insulting and another way to turn the art of teaching into an exact science that can be manned by Stepford test prep drones or teach for a while recruits. Gates continues to demean and insult the teaching profession, one he knows nothing about. Just because he is a billionaire, it is assumed he is a expert on all topics and all professions. Bill and Melinda and the rest of the faux reformers should give up three years of their lives and work on the front line teaching public school children……plan the lessons, monitor their progress, grade papers, chart the data, enrich for the talented and gifted while individualizing and differentiating for those who struggle, attend 504 meetings, PPT’s, parent conferences, district workshops.  It is time for them to walk the walk and then let’s plan to talk some more about the teaching profession.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Technology, Computers

Gates Foundation Explains the Galvanic Skin Response Monitor (plus)

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2012 //
34

An enlightening article by Stephanie Simon of Reuters was just posted. Simon interviewed Gates’ officials and others, and her article fills in the Gates’ rationale that has until now been missing. The article says:

The biometric bracelets, produced by a Massachusetts startup company, Affectiva Inc, send a small current across the skin and then measure subtle changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. The wireless devices have been used in pilot tests to gauge consumers’ emotional response to advertising.

Gates officials hope the devices, known as Q Sensors, can become a common classroom tool, enabling teachers to see, in real time, which kids are tuned in and which are zoned out.

Existing measures of student engagement, such as videotaping classes for expert review or simply asking kids what they liked in a lesson, “only get us so far,” said Debbie Robinson, a spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation. To truly improve teaching and learning, she said, “we need universal, valid, reliable and practical instruments” such as the biosensors.

Robinson assures the reporter that the “engagement pedometers” (odd to have a pedometer worn as a bracelet) are not intended to measure teacher effectiveness, at least not now.

The engagement pedometer is not formally part of that program; the biosensors are intended to give teachers feedback rather than evaluate their effectiveness, said Robinson, the Gates spokeswoman.

Still, if the technology proves reliable, it may in the future be used to assess teachers, Robinson acknowledged. “It’s hard for one to say what people may, at some point, decide to do with this,” she said.

Some teachers expressed disdain for the device, but the reporter managed to find someone from a Gates-funded organization to praise it:

To Sandi Jacobs, the promise of such technology outweighs the vague fear that it might be used in the future to punish teachers who fail to engage their students’ Q Sensors.

Any device that helps a teacher identify and meet student needs “is a good thing,” said Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that receives funding from the Gates Foundation. “We have to be really open to what technology can bring.”

NCTQ, readers may recall, was the subject of an earlier blog here.

ADDENDUM: There must be yet another Gates grant for the “galvanic skin response” research. Until now, I had learned of only two: the Clemson research for nearly half a million; the National Commission on Time and Learning for some $600,000. The Reuters article noted above refers to $1.4 million in grants for this research, which means that some other group of researchers is working on developing the technology to measure student responses to instruction via physiological reactions.

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Computers

“Techies Gone Wild”

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2012 //
8

I take the title of this blog from a comment just received in response to the galvanic thingie (I have trouble remembering if it is a GSR or a GRS, a galvanic skin response monitor or a galvanic response skin monitor).

The title seemed appropriate for an article sent by another reader. This one describes a decision by a Texas school district to put GPS necklaces on their students so that they can be tracked during school hours. If that sounds far-fetched, note that other districts in Texas and California are already using the GPS devices to improve attendance. A town in Brazil plans to have its students wear uniforms embedded with a GPS device.

Amazing how so many small steps may be taken without much alarm. And one day we will find that government and corporations can watch our every move. Will we be wearing bracelets or necklaces or will we have microchips implanted at birth.

Technies gone wild indeed. At some point, we will recognize those techies as our bosses.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Technology, Computers

New Information on the Galvanic Skin Response Bracelet

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2012 //
16

The Gates Foundation now says that its grants for the galvanic skin response monitor had no connection with teacher evaluation, even though the statement on its web site says the purpose of the grant is to “determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers” and says that the researchers at Clemson will be working with the MET (teacher evaluation) project of the Gates Foundation.

The foundation issued the following statement yesterday (sent to me by a reporter, without a link), responding to the questions raised on this blog and elsewhere:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding a portfolio of nearly $1.4 million in grants to support researchers interested in studying students’ classroom engagement – based on biometric measures like skin sensitivity, as indicated through bracelets.  This pilot of approximately 100 students has not yet begun.  Past studies with autistic children have used the bracelets to show those who might seem unresponsive to external stimuli are engaged and learning .

These grants are not all related to the Measures of Effective Teaching research project, and will not in any way be used to evaluate teacher performance.  Rather, these are tools to help students and teachers gain a better understanding how and when students are most engaged in the classroom, with the ultimate goal of learning how to help students learn better.

The foundation is funding, rather than conducting this research, and specific questions about research design and objectives are best directed to researchers  Rosalind Picard picard@affectiva.com and Shaundra Dailysdaily@clemson.edu.

In this statement, the foundation insists that the bracelets “will not in any way be used to evaluate teacher performance.” That is interesting since the grant announcement said the money was connected to the Gates MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) program. But, let’s take them at their word. Developing these biometric measures has nothing to do with measuring teachers’ performance, which is a major focus of the foundation at this time.

But here’s more new information.

A reader sent the following comment:

In 2008 Microsoft filed a patent application for a system that monitors employee metabolism: “one or more physiological or environmental sensors to detect at least one of heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement, facial movements, facial expressions, and blood pressure.”Here is the patent application. And here is an article about it.
Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Computers

A Flaw in the Galvanic Response Skin Bracelet

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2012 //
20

A reader writes:

What grabbed me was this part:
“electrodermal activity that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation.”

So, this means that they can’t tell the difference between excitement, attention and anxiety? So all you have to do is keep a class in constant fear and you ace the evaluation? It also can’t tell the difference between boredom and relaxation. So if you’re doing “sustained silent reading,” which is it? Are students supposed to be “on” all the time?

I’m not a teacher, and even I can see that this is a huge steaming pile. But it got them a $500K grant! Nice work if you can get it – and stomach it.

Let’s see now. The teacher who keeps the class in a state of high anxiety gets points on the “effectiveness” scale. The teacher whose students are feeling at ease in the classroom will get a low rating.

If this reader saw through this flaw, why did no one at the Gates Foundation?

Last night, I googled “galvanic response skin” and got thousands of hits. It is happening, it has many uses apparently.

But surely you can see how it can be used to mine classroom data, to find out whose students sit on the edge of their seats in a state of alertness, attention and anxiety, and whose are slacking off.

Data mining is now a customary part of the business of online corporations who record our every move, which web pages we open, which products we buy online, which books we are interested in. All of this information is assembled, filtered, and compressed into a personalized profile, so that advertisers can target us with their messages wherever we go on the ‘Net. No point advertising automobile products to me, but they will be just right for someone else. Once gathered, this information can be sold and resold.

Once you understand the template, you can understand the logic of the Galvanic Response Skin bracelets. They will be one more piece of “objective” data to add to test scores, student surveys, and observations when evaluating a teacher. He or she may contest the observations, but how can they protest the objective readings of students’ skin responses to instructions?

And think of the professional development opportunities! Soon there will be workshops on how to increase your students’ GRS ratings. And there will be trained GSR facilitators and GSR measurement experts and GSR coaches.

It all fits so nicely with the U.S. Department of Education’s huge investment in data warehouses for every state. Before long, there will be a statistical profile for every student, compiled from their vital statistics at birth to their pre-kindergarten readiness assessments to everything that happens thereafter.

And to what end?

Diane

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Computers

Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Crazier…

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2012 //
42

I opened the following email and at first I thought it was a prank or, as another reader put it, an article taken from The Onion. See what you think:

—–Original Message—–
From: Leonie Haimson
To: nyceducationnews ; paa news
Sent: Fri, Jun 8, 2012 10:08 am
Subject: [nyceducationnews] Gates Foundation: one more step into the dystopian future with electronic bracelets for students & teachers

 
Gates Foundation experimenting w/Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets in teacher eval project
 See Susan Ohanian, excerpt below:
 http://goo.gl/KBXtO
 
Look up “effective teaching” on Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grants. Here’s one of the awards.

To: Clemson University
Purpose: to work with members of the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) team to measure engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers [emphasis added]
Amount: $498,055

Think about that!!

NOTE: The emerging field of neuromarketing relies on biometric technologies to determine a participant’s emotional and cognitive response to certain stimuli. In the case of neuromarketing, this stimulus is anything from a television commercial to an internet advertisement. There are six primary biometrics used to gather data on physiological responses to marketing…

So Gates wants to apply it to effective teaching.

The Affectiva Q Sensor is a wearable, wireless biosensor that measures emotional arousal via skin conductance, a form of electrodermal activity that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation.

Here’s a paper on the topic: MobiCon: Mobile Context Monitoring Platform for Sensor-Rich Dynamic Environments

Smart mobile devices will be the central gateway for
personal services in the emerging pervasive environment
(Figure 1). They will enable a lot of personal context-aware
applications, forming a personal sensor network with a
number of diverse sensor devices, placed over human body
or in surrounding spaces. Diverse sensors act as the useful
tool for the applications to acquire users’ contexts1 , i.e.,
current status of an individual or surrounding situation that
she/he faces into, without their intervention [42].
 
Wikipedia says neuromarketing is a new field of marketing research that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. So the Gates Foundation joins Google, CB S, and Frito-Lay in looking for ways to measure consumer reactions to products.

Put a Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelet on every kid in the class and you can measure teacher effectiveness in keeping their attention.

Maybe the next step is for the bracelet to zap them with electric current when their attention wanders.

And then the next generation will be the Galvanic Skin Response bracelet on every teacher–to zap her when she veers from the Common Core curriculum. Then. . . bring on the drones to eliminate such teachers.
 
 Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.

I needed A reality check, so I googled “galvanic skin response” and added “Clemson.” up popped the following link:

Home/Clemson University
SHARE
Clemson University
Date: November 2011
Purpose: to work with members of the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) team to measure engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers
Amount: $498,055
Term: 1 year and 2 months
Topic: College-Ready Education
Region Served: Global, North America
Program: United States
Grantee Location: Clemson, South Carolina
Grantee Web site: http://www.clemson.edu

What can I say? Shades of Brave New World.

Which district will be first to put the bracelets on their students and teachers? Will charter school students have to wear them, or only children in public schools? Who will pay for them? Will schools raise money by selling the data to Amazon and Google and other data-mining corporations? Have we lost all common sense?

Diane

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Computers

The Case of Melinda Gates’ Statement, Solved

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2012 //
8

I asked my readers if Melinda Gates was right when she said that an effective teacher would get three times the “gains” of an ineffective reader and if you knew the source of this statistic or claim. I had many thoughtful replies. Many people had heard the claim, which was made not only by Melinda Gates but Michelle Rhee. Some attributed it to Eric Hanushek, some to Education Trust, some to William Sanders.

Surely there can be no doubt that some teachers are more successful than others, at least with some children in some years. Can all teachers get the same gains every year? Not so clear.

Imagine if every child in every classroom in the U.S. had an effective teacher every year, as Melinda Gates said would one day be possible due to the work of the Gates Foundation. That would mean that every child would gain 18 months of instruction every year. By the end of eighth grade, every child would be ready to go to college, having gotten the test score gains equivalent to twelve years of schooling. College-readiness by 13 or 14! That would surely be a break-through for our society and would change the nature of college-going.

In the search for the provenance of Melinda Gates’ statement, Gary Rubinstein seems to have cracked the code with his research. Gary teaches math at Stuyvestant High School and has his own blog, as you will see if you open the link. Gary tracked the claim back to a paper by Eric Hanushek in 1992 (which was cited by some other readers as well). His analysis is worth reading. What Rubinstein discovers about this 20-year-old study will surprise you and make you wonder why so many people are citing it today as definitive proof of certain policy ideas. No one offered any evidence that the 1992 study (or whenever it was conducted) has been replicated, so we don’t need to worry about a sudden explosion of 14-year-olds prepared to enter college.

Diane

PS: A reader on Twitter suggests that she would be satisfied if 14-year-olds arrived with appropriate skills and knowledge for their grade:

Margot Durkin ‏@mrsdurkinmuses

,@DianeRavitch re: M Gates: how about we strive to have every 14 year old ready for real high school work?

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Computers

Is Melinda Gates Right?

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2012 //
40

When Melinda Gates was interviewed on the PBS Newshour on June 4, she said something that surprised me. I will give you the full quote, which I copied from the Newshour website. I was surprised because I never heard that claim, I don’t know whose research she was citing or if it even exists. I checked with Linda Darling-Hammond, who seems to have read every study of teacher effectiveness, and asked her if she knew the source; she said she had never heard this claim and had no idea where Melinda Gates got this information, if it exists.

So, I ask my readers, and I ask you to ask your friends in the academic world, do you have a citation for this statement?

MELINDA GATES: Well, we know from good research that the fundamental thing that makes a difference in the classroom is an effective teacher. An effective teacher in front of a student, that student will make three times the gains in a school year that another student will make.

And so what the foundation feels our job is to do is to make sure we create a system where we can have an effective teacher in every single classroom across the United States.

The second claim is that the foundation has the knowledge to “create a system where we can have an effective teacher in every single classroom across the United States.” Someday, someone might ask whether they have achieved that goal. Right now, I would be content if the Gates Foundation were able to point to a single district in the U.S. where they had achieved that goal.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Computers

Will Technology Cut the Budget?

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2012 //
6

The answer to this question, says this reader, is no. Libertarians and folks on the right believe that technology will make it possible to replace teachers with machines. Machines don’t need health care or pensions. And their salaries don’t go up in a step schedule. When the machines get obsolete, you junk them. With teachers, you can’t just toss them aside, unless your state passed a law banning seniority and tenure.

This is the reader’s comment:

As a technology professional, I guarantee that technology is not a way to save money in education.

I do think it can be a way to improve instruction in some subjects, and to allow kids more options if they are willing to self-direct and take responsibility for their own learning. For example, an ambitious kid who wants to learn Mandarin in a school with no Mandarin teacher and no other students who want to learn Mandarin could do so online, on school time, using school resources, while guided by a non-Mandarin speaking teacher. I wholly support this. This is far different from expecting that you could put 100 or even 40 random students in a room and expect that by the end of the year they will all be able to communicate in basic Mandarin.

People think that technology (unlike teachers) doesn’t eat; that is, that it has an initial purchase price and then you don’t have to keep paying for it. Ask yourself how many private organizations of 200 or 2000 people do so without a large in-house technology staff. Ask yourself how many schools have enough amperage in their electrical systems – let alone outlets – to handle all those computers, and the inevitable air conditioning that follows. Ask yourself how much new batteries cost and how often they’ll have to be replaced. Ask yourself what will happen at this school on the days the internet is down.

And these ridiculous ratios of students to teachers online miss other important realities. If students are going to write essays, they have to be graded by humans. 200 essays is a lot to grade whether you are in the same room during the day or not. I suppose we could save money for a decade or two by outsourcing the grading of our english essays to India… would be quite interesting to see how our use of written idiom changes as a result!

Diane

Categories Technology, Computers
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