Martin Wallace

Measuring Student Confidence through Low-Risk Competition: The UTA Libraries Pitch of the Week Contest (POW!)

Slides
Martin K. Wallace, MS, MLIS
Maker Literacies and Engineering Liaison Librarian
University of Texas at Arlington Libraries
[email protected]

In April 2017, the UTA Libraries will hold a series of pitch contests modeled on the Iron Chef Battles in the Technology Test Kitchen at the 2016 OLC Accelerate Conference. Students will be placed on teams and provided a random prompt with which to brainstorm an idea for an invention, product, service, new business, or solution to a problem. Teams will have 20 minutes to brainstorm and refine their ideas, and then 5 minutes to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges. Winning teams from each of three preliminary rounds will move on to compete in the final round. This contest will be staged much like a game show, and will be held in the UTA FabLab. Teams will be able to use any and all digital tools at their disposal, including the Internet, to conduct their brainstorming and create their presentations. Competitors will be asked prior to the contests to rate their confidence levels in the categories of teamwork, proposal writing, technical communication, creative thinking, and critical thinking. Students will again be given the same questionnaire after the contests. We will evaluate whether or not the competition had any influence on student confidence levels in these categories.

 

  • Martin Wallace

    More information about this project is available at my LinkLab Domains Page: http://martinwallace.linklab.domains/ I will update that page when I have data to share and my once I’ve written my final project report.

  • Maria Trache

    Martin, since the contest is based on teamwork, I assume the tasks will be distributed among team members who will contribute their best skills to make the team win (e.g., one contributes to the writing part and another one to the technical part of the project). Are you measuring student confidence level individually or as a team? because it’s possible that everyone will increase confidence only in the category they contributed, not in all. Just a guess.

    • Martin Wallace

      For this study I’m only looking at individuals. I’m sure that you are correct that students’ confidence may rise or lower as a result of the specific task(s) they will be handling in the contest. I had not thought about it until you mentioned it here, that is a very good point. I don’t think this exercise is suited to that type of study, but if scaled up and able to track/target students for specific roles/tasks, then that kind of data could be gathered.

  • Marcela Gutierrez

    Hi Martin. This is a neat concept and gives me a lot of ideas on how I might ask students to pitch their own projects in the classroom. I’d love to hear your feedback not only about student confidence level, but how students engage in the project overall and what works/doesn’t work with this type of project.

    • Martin Wallace

      I replied to this in-depth, and now it’s gone. I’m not going to type it all again. Sorry Marcela, don’t know why that happened. You could keep an eye on http://martinwallace.linklab.domains/ to see how the project progresses, and look for my final report to find out what worked well/what didn’t work.

      • Marcela Gutierrez

        Thanks!

  • J. T. Dellinger

    Hi Martin - I really look forward to seeing the results and am going to come by tomorrow to check it out! Do you plan to run POW again in the future? If so, what would be some of the changes that you would make to it, from implementation to data collection?

    • Martin Wallace

      Yes, we hope to do this every semester. We’ll be making several changes, from how voting/judging is conducted to updating the topic cards that are used to form the prompts. And a lot of other little things. I’ll be sure to include all that information in my final report.

      • J. T. Dellinger

        Very cool. I look forward to seeing how this grows! Very encouraging that you were able to get good participant numbers overall. How big has the audience been so far?

        • Peggy Semingson

          I hope to attend this in the future! I have been a judge at the House of Genius twice which was similar to a pitch contest!

        • Martin Wallace

          First let me say that it’s difficult to gauge audience size. It depends on who is being counted. There are a large number of students (maybe 30-40) in the FabLab doing their own thing during the contests. They sometime will participate in the trivia or pop over to watch the contests. There are others who stand around the outskirts (maybe 10-12) and watch for a few minutes but are really just passing through. And then there are a small number who actually come to watch the whole show. That’s usually in the 3-5 range. It is also very difficult for me to count them because I’m running around trying to take care of other things. I think this is something we can look at doing in future events, actually counting the audience.

          The audience was pretty big for the first event, it dwindled for the second and third events, and then today for the final event it was big again.

  • J. T. Dellinger
  • J. T. Dellinger
  • Peggy Semingson

    Good job, Martin! I like that you took an idea from OLC and then adapted it for the library and for students! I think that’s the best thing I like among other things! Another feature I liked was how this project was very collaborative.

    Have you thought about streamlining some of the things, like can you live stream it through mobile device and keep it really simple?

    It’s interesting that the confidence scores went down! I would’ve expected the same as you did in your prediction that they would’ve gone up. It might be interesting to track these types of self-assessed scores over time. Or, you might have people write short open ended comments about what their experience was like!

    • Martin Wallace

      Initially I wanted to live stream via a mobile device and keep it simple. One of our collaborators (Michael Magnus in Dept. of Communications) suggested adding a service learning component to the project and recruited a student to take care of the A/V and streaming over Facebook. I’m not exactly sure what was formally worked out (I was all too willing to just let them handle this without any of my input/interference) but it was something like this: Magnus partnered one of his more motivated students with a staff member in the Comms Dept as sort of an intern/apprentice. The staff member showed the student how to setup and run the live stream, including adding in the overlays/banners/background music. They worked together on the first three events, then during the fourth event, the student flew solo. From what I’ve seen, they have done a great job. I haven’t seen the feed from today yet, but I imagine the student didn’t fine on his own.

      There are a lot of small moving pieces involved in a program/project this size. I’ve been taking notes and collecting feedback and we will no doubt be streamlining other aspects. If we can’t get an “intern” to run A/V in future iterations, we may very well be using an iPhone to provide the live stream. We’ll be looking at many other things to streamline and optimize as well.

      I agree there are problems with the assessment model I’ve chosen. I want to continue collecting data in the same way, but also adding other data points (such as the open ended question you suggested) and others that have been recommended by others in this forum. I also want to avoid an overly-bulky survey for the students. Assessment for this program will continue to evolve.