Digital Choice Boards: A Highly Flexible Approach to STEM Learning for Students

by Robert W. Maloy and Torrey Trust, November 2021

Imagine being asked to choose how you would prefer to learn about the STEM innovations that shaped U.S. history. Would you want to create an interactive map of the nation's first canals, roads, and railroads? Write and illustrate a children's book celebrating women pioneers in space exploration? Evaluate the influence of a historical scientific innovation on present-day society? Design 3D models or augmented reality exhibits about Native American cities and homes? The choices and possibilities are endless; the impacts for learning are long lasting.

In this article, we showcase digital choice boards as a highly flexible learning approach that can be collaboratively developed by school librarians, teachers, and/or students. A choice board is a "graphic organizer that allows students to choose different ways to learn about a particular concept" (Reinken 2012). Digital choice boards are enhanced versions of traditional paper-based choice boards; they typically include hyperlinks to digital resources and tools as well as a curated set of digital activities that students can choose from to support, enrich, and/or extend their learning. Content-based digital choice boards might focus on a specific topic, objective, standard, or theme (see an example at https://bit.ly/historyscitech), while technology-based digital choice boards might feature different tools and apps (see an example at https://bit.ly/digitalmediachoiceboard). These boards can include some structure in the form of directions (e.g., "complete 3 boxes in a row"); however, they are generally more open-ended compared to other directed digital learning experiences, such as HyperDocs (Highfill et al., 2019; Carpenter et al. 2021) or learning playlists. With digital choice boards, students are empowered to determine what and how they learn, and this can increase trust between the learner and teacher, improve motivation, and foster democracy in the classroom (Brennan 2019).

Digital Choice Boards for STEM Learning

Digital choice boards can invite captivating explorations of STEM curriculum topics in all types of educational settings and disciplines. In the following two examples, we showcase how a math teacher and social studies teacher used choice boards to support and inspire STEM learning.

Brianna, a middle school math teacher, hosted a March Madness-style tournament for Women's History Month where students voted to determine which woman was most influential in STEM history. Students were given a digital choice board to explore women scientists and mathematicians, including Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Mary Anning, Rosalind Franklin, Marie Curie, and Beatrix Potter. Each student selected one woman to learn more about and then wrote a short statement about that woman's influence on STEM history. Students presented their statements to classmates who then voted on which woman would continue through the tournament bracket. Different women emerged as March Madness winners in each of Brianna's five math classes.

Erich, a middle school social studies teacher, used a digital choice board to introduce students to the influence of technology on different periods of history as a cross-disciplinary project between social studies and science classes. Boxes on the digital choice board featured historical technologies, such as irrigation systems of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Galileo's use of the telescope, the printing press, Marc Brunel and the mass production of interchangeable parts, and Charles Babbage and his vision of a computer. Students then created physical or digital 3D model replicas of a technology of their choosing from the digital choice board.

Designing Instruction with Digital Choice Boards

Digital choice boards can be used by students individually or as part of team-based learning activities. They can be implemented in online, HyFlex, and in-person settings. They can be used as a hook to introduce students to a topic, as station activity for deeper exploration of content, or as an extension of a lesson or unit. Digital choice boards offer flexible ways to engage students in or out of school (Trust and Maloy 2020).

Digital choice boards function as a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach to instructional design. The UDL framework encourages educators to provide learners with multiple ways to access and explore content (representation), show their thinking and understanding (action & expression), and interact with the content in an interest-driven manner (engagement) ("About Universal Design for Learning"). The UDL framework was designed to help educators increase opportunities for learning by removing barriers, such as one-size-fits-all teaching approaches, that leave many students behind.

Digital choice boards are flexible tools that can support multiple means of engagement, action and expression, and representation. They can support multiple means of representation through the inclusion of multimodal content or links to digital resources for learning. For instance, each box of the Foundations of the U.S. Political System Media Literacy Activities Choice Board (http://bit.ly/foundationsUSpoliticsmedialit) features a link to an open access eBook chapter with multimodal information about the topic, which allows students to read the text, have the text read aloud through a text-to-speech tool of their choosing, or watch videos that have closed captions.

Digital choice boards can support multiple means of engagement by incorporating open-ended activities that align with students' interests and by giving students the opportunity to choose the activities they want to complete. Some students might choose an activity based on the topic (e.g., greatest scientific blunders in history), while other students might choose an activity based on the tool or task (e.g., designing a comic). Having the opportunity to choose increases engagement and interest-driven learning.

Finally, digital choice boards can facilitate multiple means of action and expression by allowing students to pick how they want to showcase their thinking or understanding. For example, a student might be given the Digital Media Design Choice Board (https://bit.ly/digitalmediachoiceboard) at the end of a lesson with an open-ended prompt, such as: "Select any tool from this choice board and then design a digital media product to teach your family members at least three things you learned from this lesson."

Designing a Choice Board

Digital choice boards can be designed in a Word or Google Document by using the table feature. They can be organized with a different number of boxes: ten boxes (top row of four, bottom row of four, and one box on either side a center box) is a common format, but six, eight, nine, or twelve boxes are also effective configurations.

What appears at first glance to be a fairly straightforward presentation of information is in fact an opportunity for librarians, together with teachers and students, to assemble different learning resources in an interactive format to support higher-order thinking and learning. When we design content-based digital choice boards, we include three different elements within each box:

• Visual: A public domain or Creative Commons image, which is linked to its original source (e.g., Wikimedia Commons, NASA.gov), serves to attract the attention of learners and draw them into the topic. For example, a box about space exploration has a public domain photograph of Jerri Cobb, one of NASA's first women astronauts, next to the Mercury space capsule.
• Higher-Order Thinking Activity: High-tech activities (e.g., code a Scratch story, design a multimodal eBook, construct 3D digital artifacts) and low-tech activities (e.g., design and present a play, create a sketchnote, construct a cardboard replica, go on a haiku hike) serve to facilitate deeper interactions with the content. When designing activities, it is critical to move beyond asking students to summarize information in a creative way (e.g., design a podcast to explain what you learned) to "Create + Creativity" (Maloy et al. 2021), which involves combining opportunities to create new knowledge or ideas with opportunities to creatively communicate. For instance, students could design a Scratch story or board game to educate others about the Code Girls, build a monument for an influential woman or underrepresented individual in STEM, or produce a stop-motion animation about Alice Guy-Blaché's influence on cinema today. In each of these examples, learners engage in higher-order thinking by generating original works rather than simply summarizing or explaining what they learned.
• Link to Information: Links to external sources serve as points of departure for further research and discovery. Since, generally, there is not enough space in a single box to present all of the information a student needs to complete the activity, we include a link to a single reliable resource, ideally one that is multimodal, inclusive, and accessible. For history and government topics, we link to the Building Democracy for All: Interactive Explorations of Government and Civic Life eBook (https://edtechbooks.org/democracy) or the resourcesforhistoryteachers wiki (http://resourcesforhistoryteachers.pbworks.com/), which contain multimodal and multicultural learning resources and content. For STEM topics, links can point to resources from science institutes, the Library of Congress, and professional teacher organizations, such as the National Council of Teachers of Math.

Conclusion

Digital choice boards offer multiple ways to inspire students in all types of learning settings, and librarians, working collaboratively with teachers and students, are critical to the success of choice board development, implementation, and evaluation. Every board needs engaging, legally sourced images; links to reliable information; and higher-order learning activities for students. Librarians can help generate all three. Librarians can also work directly with students who may be doing research for their own digital choice boards or completing assignments from boards developed by teachers. Digital choice boards are powerful digital literacy learning activities in that they demand that students use online resources and act as critical evaluators of web-based information. Librarians can support those student explorations by identifying sources of reliable information and by showing students how to identify and reject online sites that contain bias and outright misinformation. Finally, as digital choice board developers, librarians can act as post-pandemic educational pathfinders, guiding teachers and students in the use of this highly flexible approach to STEM learning.

Works Cited

"About Universal Design for Learning." CAST. https://www.cast.org/impact/universal-design-for-learning-udl. Accessed 2021.

Brennan, Aoife. "Differentiation through Choice as an Approach to Enhance Inclusive Practice." REACH Journal of Special Needs Education in Ireland 32, no. 1 (2019).

Highfill, Lisa, Kelly Hilton, and Sarah Landis. The HyperDoc Handbook: Digital Lesson Design Using Google Apps. EdTechTeam Press, 2016.

Carpenter, Jeffrey P., Torrey Trust, and Tim D. Green. "Transformative Instruction or Old Wine in New Skins? Exploring How and Why Educators Use HyperDocs." Computers & Education 157 (2010).

Maloy, Robert, Torrey Trust, and Sharon A. Edwards. "Create + Creativity: Taking Bloom's Taxonomy to the Next Level During Remote Learning." Medium (January 29, 2021). https://medium.com/inspired-ideas-prek-12/create-creativity-taking-blooms-taxonomy-to-the-next-level-during-remote-learning-381a251e58ec

Reinken, Cassidy. "How to Use Choice Boards to Differentiate Learning." The Art of Education University. (2012). https://theartofeducation.edu/2012/07/11/how-to-use-choice-boards-to-differentiate-learning/

Trust, Torrey, and Robert Maloy. "Designing High-Quality Choice Boards for Student-Centered Explorations of Content." In E. Langran (Ed.), Proceedings of SITE Interactive 2020 Online Conference (p. 311-314). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), 2020. https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/218162/.