PAWS meeting - Jan 28, 2009

1. Integrating Conceptual and Procedural Instruction for Middle-school Math – A Cognitive Tutoring Approach (Gustavo Santos)

Gustavo presented his course project on integrating conceptual instruction into cognitive tutors which are only based on procedural instruction. They have designed think aloud task analysis to figure out the common errors and common strategies to design the conceptual part of the cognitive model. The task analysis was done with university students. He is going to continue on the project by evaluating the approach with middle school students and adding adaptation into the approach.

His presentation was followed by some interesting discussion on how to add personalization, how to model student's knowledge (conceptual vs procedural) and how to evaluate the approach.


2. Modeling Problem Solving in CUMULATE (Michael Yudelson)
Mike presented his idea on improving knowledge modeling by blending user knowledge from trying examples with knowledge from problem solving. He presented some result on effect of his blending approach on prediction of user knowledge by both CUMULATE and Knowledge Tracing. His results suggest some careful consideration of blending :-)

His presentation was extended with lots of discussion about CUMULATE versus Knowledge Tracing user modeling.
blending examples and problems

PAWS meeting 2009/01/14

Web-based parameterized questions for object-oriented programming

Sharon presented her study about the parameterized questions for the Java OOP language. QuizJET and JavaGuide were implemented and tested in classrooms by the undergraduate student at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.

The research questions are:
(1) whether the parameterized questions will work in OOP domain
(2) are en encourage students to work with the questions more
(3) how does the question complexity affect students' assessment

According to the analysis results, the adaptive navigation support implemented in JavaGuide promoted students' participation, increased the success rate, helped strong/weak students to access appropriate questions, encouraged students to make more attempts on easy quizzes, and found strong students had higher success rate for hard questions.

S-vLab virtual lab for teaching and learning in higher education

Anna Riccioni, a visiting scholar from Italy, presented her work. The project is a virtual laboratory for supporting information security course. It is aimed to help heterogeneous students (background, expertise, preferred learning procedures) achieve conceptual understanding and practical skills. The solution to this problem is the virtual lab, called S-vLab in blended learning context. It is used for teaching information security by verifying security principles, model, test, develop secure systems in diverse learning phases and paths. Important S-vLab features are support tools (mentor, expert, judge), modeling (graphical editor), testing, implementation, simulation & evaluation.

She plans to expend the current work to embrace the personalization and the distributed architecture and tracking capabilities including learner profiles and social mechanisms.

System url: http://lia.deis.unibo.it/Courses/TecnologieSicurezzaAK/S-vLab.html