Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikidemia/Primary education

Primary education -

  Participants

• Jeremy Tobacman
• Sj
• Hector Zenil
• zdenek

A small but growing group of classrooms in primary schools are using Wikipedia materials as part of their classes.

Researchers and educators are carrying out studies of the impact of access to broad repositories of knowledge, and access to collaborative communities, on the inspiration and academic development of children. It is certainly the case that many older students and adults can track some of their deep passion about a topic to their first access to an encyclopedia, or to encyclopedic information about a specific topic. However real research into the subject is lacking.

This goal can be partly satisfied by constructing and maintaining a publicly-available set of statistical metrics about learning, comprehension, and contribution; and of the contributions of specific schools. This need not be only a matter for primary schools, but starting there makes it easy to develop parallel studies of high school and university communities.

TODO List

Todo Queue --- currently scheduled activities.

Other:

• Contact educators who have done quantitative work on Wikipedia, in hopes that their experiences (and code) will inform our own work with the data.
• Construct a working set of class and student metrics.
• Establish a list of statistics could be created with readership data and editing stats, and describe procedures to safeguard privacy while analyzing various forms of readership data.
• Funding sources and proposals, including collaborating with groups already handling the overhead of school contact and providing static Wikipedia snapshots (for instance, a CD/DVD or schools-wikipedia instance).