Reading and Writing English Product

Learning Goals

• Create a product that meets market demands

• Come up with an extra-curricular product that will bridge the gap between high school and college courses

• Ideate a scaleable product that brings educational value to clientele (international students from grades 9-12)

• Promote critical thinking skills, improve reading, and hone writing skills

Problem Statement

• How might we better prepare high school students for college-level courses?

• How might we bridge the thinking skills gap between K-12 and college-level courses?

Design Process

By conducting user interviews with product designers, product managers, and end-users, I was able to understand the demand of courses to be created for our clientele. Our clientele were international students, grades 9-12, who wanted to bridge their critical thinking skills gap needed to enter liberal-arts colleges in the United States. I began to ideate and brainstorm based on our end-user’s feedback.

Based on the consumer demand, we decided to map out all the plausibilities that a student might end up taking based on the student’s interest. This mind map illustrates all the possibilities that a student may take based on their end goals. This ensured that we would be able to adapt this to the students’ interest, but with the potential to scale the slew of course offerings to different customers all over the world.

Product

Brainstorming with product managers and users, we came up with a product called “Reading and Writing English” (RWE) — a series of courses which taught critical thinking through reading and writing. Our research indicated that there was a tremendous opportunity to teach international students’ courses that spurred critical thinking skills, as highlighted by the RWE course series. During my time at Thinktown Inc., I created a four-part history lesson for these students, with each lesson focusing on a unique skill set. Here is the outline of the course that I created, which is based loosely on advanced IB and AP history courses, which are more advanced course material, closing the gap between high school and college work.

Click the links to see the four-part course of the history component of RWE.

Part 1: Reading Historical Sources

Part 2: Claims and Evidence in Sources

Part 3: Contextualization

Part 4: Identifying Patterns of Change

Learning Evaluation Measures:

As an instructional designer, quality check and control was a significant part of my role in designing and reviewing curriculum for courses that Thinktown Inc., created. To ensure the quality of the material and the control of designs, it was necessary to conduct a comprehensive review of all the RWE products based on end-user feedback.

Future Course Development: In the future, as an extension of the RWE course series, here is a proposal to expand the current course offerings at Thinktown Inc., given the current slew of courses offered.

Instructional Design Decisions

• Constructivism, as a theory of learning asserts that as learners, we learn best through meaning-making. Giving the students agency to learn and pick a class based on their interests ensures that they are intrinsically motivated to take the course, and successfully complete it.

• Expectancy-Value Theory of Motivation illustrates that a learner’s motivation is defined by how much they value the goal and whether or not a learner expects to succeed in that goal. The Utility Value states that a learner’s motivation is affected by how useful a learner perceives that subject to be relative to one’s future goals and aspirations. Therefore, a student may be more invested and intrinsically motivated to complete a course if it is related to their future.