Classroom dynamics including interactions among peers and with teachers is a key component of students' STEM experiences, strongly influencing students' motivation to engage in the learning activities. Classroom dynamics and dialogue have been predominantly studied through longitudinal ethnographic observations of the classroom while the perspective of the students who are undergoing these experiences is largely unaccounted for. This research article showcases an empirical study that used student drawings to explore STEM classroom dynamics. In contrast with interviews, drawing allows the participant to illuminate their tacit knowledge and communicate ideas without interference from the researcher. The participants (n=32), 9th grade students from 16 public schools in Northern India, were asked to create a poster with drawings and words to show their experiences and feelings in mathematics and science classrooms. A thematic analysis of students' work was performed to draw inferences about the classroom dynamics. The posters provided an opportunity for students to authentically express themselves and represent the social and emotional consequences of teacher behaviour in STEM classrooms. Concurring with previous classroom dynamics research, findings identified a strong need to reassess teaching practices in rural Indian context.
Assessment in this day and age is not just limited to the paper-pen or digital screens tests in the classroom, comprised of questions that primarily check memory retention as a means to evaluate the knowledge and skills acquired from the provided instructional materials. Instead, it goes past the notion of simple traditional assessment measures by explicitly prompting learners to think in self-regulating and metacognitive or disciplinary terms at all points during their learning using multidirectional learner-centered assessments. This chapter makes the case for one platform (CGScholar) that employs such multidirectional assessments as a means to facilitate a healthy ecosystem of co-learning and crowdsourcing knowledge based on Bloom's learning for mastery ideology proactively capitalizing on avenues of educational data mining, learning analytics, and data visualization while addressing some of the concerns permeated by the long use of traditional assessment as part of our education system.
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