Joint 1st Place - 1997 EPSS Contest

Florida State University
Education Staff Support Systems - TREE

Overview
Education Staff Support Systems - TREE is an electronic performance support system that helps teachers plan, organize, and manage their work. The primary goal of TREE is to support teacher performance within the work context and give teachers more time with students.

Audience
Teachers of special education students are the primary audience. Administrators and staffing specialists also use the system. The audience represents a wide variety of computer experience and job knowledge.

Represented Task - Grouping Students
A critical task in every teacher's job is grouping students with similar instructional objectives. Many teachers serve a large number of students but have them for only a short time each day. Thus, grouping students by common time and similar objectives was a scheduling nightmare.

Previous Process Used to Group Students
In general, teachers used only time to group students due to the complexity of adding common objectives to the mix. Teachers struggled with paper and pencil methods using index cards and huge pieces of paper. Incorporating a new student could mean major rework.

Group Students By...
Encouraging teachers to ask questions like What do I need to do this task? How do I do it? What comes next? Where am I in the process? was integral to the design of the Objectives interface.

>From the planning screen below, teachers select the Objectives button.

The Objectives screen replaces the schedule to the right of the student list. Teachers now have the flexibility to find students by time, by objectives or by common objectives.

Teachers are asked what they want to find. The "Here's how" instructions change according to the answer. The button options at the bottom of the screen also change depending on the approach to the task.

Key to the success of the TREE system is its ability to support teachers in doing their work, whatever approach they choose. To further support their work, teachers can select the New Lesson button that displays a new lesson with the students and short term instructional objectives already filled in.

Summary
An online survey was conducted in May 1995. Teachers were asked to contrast their pencil and paper methods with TREE. They reported that using TREE to group students enabled them to perform their work more quickly, more easily, and with greater accuracy. Mean ratings ranged from 4.76 to 5.60 on a six-point scale.

TREE supports best practices by giving teachers the ability to group students in meaningful ways and to develop lesson plans with common objectives as the focus. In addition, teacher training time has been dramatically reduced, varying from multiple workshops per year to approximately a half-day introduction to TREE.