File:Visualizing Learning With Turtle Art.pdf

By Walter Bender and Claudia Urrea In their paper, “Making learning visible”, the authors describe a framework that helps to make the outcomes of large-scale education reform initiatives visible, understandable, and actionable by all audiences: school administrators, teachers, parents, and the children themselves. In this paper, we examine in detail data from a programming competition among school from the “Conectandonos” project, a one-to-one computing initiative implemented in Costa Rica by Quirós Tanzi Foundation and the Costa Rican Ministry of Education. We apply the framework to the Turtle Art projects of 45 children. We demonstrate a correlation between the framework and the learning outcomes of the children. We argue that by demonstrating the efficacy of a mechanism for assessing openended problem-solving activities, we remove an obstacle from making the arts a more pervasive part of elementary education.