Assessment tools - Diagnostic Study: Introduction

Diagnostic Study: What is it and Why do it?
The third type of study described in this tutorial is a diagnostic study.

Diagnostic studies explore how and why students use technology as they do. Because benefits of technology use depend on how the technology is used, this information can be crucial in improving both the power of the technology and the outcomes of the course or program. For people with experience in computer programming, it might help this explanation to say that the process of educational diagnosis is akin to "debugging." The goal is to discover and fix barriers (and increase incentives) so that all students learn. Some diagnosis involves factors that affect everyone in the class but more often the aim is to deal with barriers and incentives that may each affect only a few students. In a class of 25 students, 12 may be having technology-related problems that are impeding learning but it is unlikely that all 12 have the same problem. Instead the task of diagnosis is to discover, student by student, whether there are fixable problems that have been blocking learning with technology.

Diagnostic studies are not always needed. Sometimes the people involved (for example, the faculty member teaching the course) can see what's going wrong in time to fix things, without the need for formal gathering of data. Take a look at the example below, where I've tried to think aloud about whether and how to design a diagnostic study.

Earlier in this tutorial we began a hypothetical study of the University of Houston Downtown's algebra program, using the LT² case study as our source of data. This study is a thought experiment, intended to illustrate several different useful approaches to evaluation. In this section, we'll begin creating a diagnostic study that might help improve technology use in the program.

Introduction || Activities || Diagnostic Data