iQpakk is a learning management system

Learning management system

A learning management system is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, and reporting of training programs, classroom and online events, e-learning programs, and training content...

 that is designed for a mobile device. Created in 2001 by Björn Stansvik, it uses Bloom's Taxonomy as the foundation for its learning system, so the student is encouraged to climb to the higher level of thought. The curriculum is built with course creation software, which takes existing material in iQpakk's database as well as a teachers own content (that has been uploaded and converted) and compiles a set of interactive course material based on Bloom's hierarchical model.

Bloom's Taxonomy

Introduced by an education committee led by Benjamin Bloom

Benjamin Bloom

Benjamin Samuel Bloom was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery-learning...

 in 1956, Bloom's Taxonomy is a multi-tiered model of classifying thinking according to six cognitive levels of complexity: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Each level requires more retention and knowledge of the subject, with evaluation being the highest level. According to this model, a student would not be able to grasp the higher levels if the lower levels had not been mastered. "The taxonomy is hierarchical, in that each level is subsumed by the higher levels. In other words, a student functioning at the 'application' level has also mastered the material at the 'knowledge' and 'comprehension' levels." This implies that people are on different levels of learning, so their individual level must be attended to for anything to be learned and comprehended fully.

Revised Bloom's Taxonomy

Lorin Anderson, who was a former student of Benjamin Bloom, decided that Bloom's Taxonomy needed updating. In the 1990's, an assembly led by Anderson proposed the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (RBT). The assembly of cognitive psychologists, testing and assessment specialists, and instructional researchers and curriculum theorists came up with six new terms or levels to describe a similar hierarchical model the Bloom's Taxonomy originally introduced.

The new terms are defined as:

• Remembering: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long-term memory.
• Understanding: Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.
• Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure through executing, or implementing.
• Analyzing: Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.
• Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.
• Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.

Anderson and the assembly sub-divided these categories even further with each term having a factual, conceptual, procedural, and meta-cognitive level.
The new sub-categories are (in order from factual to meta-cognative):

• Remembering: List, Describe, Tabulate, Appropriate Use
• Understanding: Summarize, Interpret, Predict, Execute
• Applying: Classify, Experiment, Calculate, Construct
• Analyzing: Order, Explain, Differentiate, Achieve
• Evaluating: Rank, Assess, Conclude, Action
• Creating: Combine, Plan, Compose, Actualize

The resulting grid is most helpful to teachers in both writing objectives and aligning standards with curriculum. Björn Stansvik developed iQpakk by using the RBT model and converted it into a learning content management system that not only teaches the user, but also molds the curriculum to the his or her cognitive level.

Increasing Teaching Efficiency

In July 2010, a group of researchers at the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice, Poland performed a case study called the Application of Bloom's Taxonomy for increasing teaching efficiency. Beginning in 2005, Jerzy Rutkowski, Katarzyna Moscinska, Piotr Jantos, watched a basic engineering course at the Silesian University of Technology. Some of the classes were taught using course materials and teaching exercises categorized in the levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. The remaining classes were not taught with any attention to Bloom's model. "In general, disregarding of the Bloom’s pyramid structure was found out as the leading source of laboratory failure - lack of lower level knowledge components inhibits application of medium level elements and therefore prevents successful execution of laboratory exercises." The researchers noted some other important differences between the groups, the Bloom's designed class seemed to enjoy the course more and the overall failure rate decreased. In conclusion, the authors suggested modification of course material in three ways: more calculate-assemble exercises, more obligatory pre-laboratory tasks, and practice-oriented introductory tests.

RightTaxonomy

RightTaxonomy is an educational method designed to translate business needs into educational objectives,translate educational objectives into interactive learning content, create an optimal learning path, create a personal taxonomic profile map for self-awareness and instructor facilitated remedial activities, create a cohort taxonomic profile map for continuous content optimization, work in tandem with the RightChallenge patent to create the optimal learning system. It provides rigor around defining objectives and tagging questions based on what objectives they support and which thinking skills they challenge. Based on this Taxonomic competence profile, maps for each learner are generated both for self-awareness, as well for guiding instructors in providing the optimal remedial materials. It helps to know exactly what types of thinking skills are non-mastered. Finally from a cohort perspective, if a particular thinking skill is weak, it is an indication of a content improvement area. In order to distribute information, the instructional designer must form a strong connection to the business needs through well-written objectives and then follow up with creating materials corresponding to those objectives. The learner then can interact with these targeted assets.

RightChallenge

RightChallenge is an educational method designed to prevent learner frustration and fatigue, increase retention of information over time, and match learner ability with difficulty of material. RightChallenge slowly increases the difficulty level of material over time. At certain intervals, the learner's comprehension of the material is tested. If material seems to be too challenging for the learner, RightChallenge responds by decreasing difficulty. If material seems to be too easy, RightChallenge responds by challenging the learner further. This means that the cognitive challenge is kept in the appropriate zone.

The human brain works as a series of webbed knowledge and in order to retain information, pathways and connections must be built. According to a Princeton University study, "...new rounds of synaptic modification triggered by memory reactivation...lead to...consolidation...of memory traces." RightChallenge works by inducing multiple memory traces rapidly, but automatically varying the semantic form of the question. This helps structure a serious of pathways that assists in forming retention, then retention without the support of context, and ultimately the ability to interconnect and interrelate the different pathways.

The scientific principles that govern RightChallenge are:

1. Must attend closely to features of sensory task.
2. To maintain attention, must be able to perform task at a high level of accuracy (if the task is too difficult, learning cannot be achieved and changes in sensory map do not occur).
3. Behavior must be reinforced in a highly consistent and rewarding manner to maintain motivation and drive learning through corrective feedback.
4. Highly consistent, repetitive input must be given over an intense period of time so that consistent patterns of neuronal activation occur repetitively, building specific stimulation patterns to “represent” the input from the environment in the brain.
5. Once a behavior is established (i.e., the response is accurate and consistent), learning can be driven most effectively by systematically increasing the difficulty of the task as performance improves.