Improving Assessment of Students through Semantic Space Construction

Assessment is one of the hardest tasks an Intel- ligent Tutoring System has to perform. It involves different and sometimes uncorrelated sub-tasks: building a student model to define her needs, defining tools and procedures to perform tests, understanding students’ replies to system prompts, defining suitable procedures to evaluate the correctness of students’ replies, and strategies to improve students’ abilities after the assessment session. In this work we present an improvement of our system, TutorJ, with particular attention to the assessment phase. Many tutoring systems offer only a limited set of assessment options like multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blanks tests or other types of predefined replies obtained through graphical widgets (radio-buttons, text-areas). This limited set of solutions makes interaction poor and unable to satisfy the users’ needs. Our interest is to enrich interaction with dialog in natural language. In this respect, the assessment problem is strictly connected to natural language understanding. The preliminary step is indeed to understand questions and replies of the student. We have reviewed the system design in the framework of a cognitive architecture with the aim to reach a double result: the reduction of the effort for the construction of the knowledge base and the improvement of the system capabilities in the assessment process. To this aim a new common semantic space has been defined and implemented. The entire architecture is oriented to intuitive and natural interaction

The impact of advance organizers upon students' achievement in Computer-Assisted Video Instruction /

The results-obtained by a 2 x 2 factorial posttest-showed that the visual-spoken advance organizer did not significantly influence rule-learning in the CAVI situation.It was hypothesized that subjects who receive the advance organizer treatment in a CAVI mediated lesson would achieve higher mean rule-learning test scores than those who do not receive the advance organizer treatment. To test the hypotheses, a sample of 70 college students were subjected to one of two treatment conditions. The instructional material dealing with rule-learning in basic computer programming for the CAVI lesson was developed on the basis of the Principles of Instructional Design suggested by Gagne' and Briggs (1979). The advance organizer for the CAVI mediated lesson was developed based on Ausubel et al.'s conceptual definition of the term (1978). Translated into operational terms, Mayer's (1979) checklist of attributes for advance organizers provided the basis for the advance organizer developed.One of the newer tools for instruction today is Computer-Assisted Video Instruction (CAVI). The focus of this study was the impact of advance organizers as an instructional strategy upon students' achievement in CAVI. Specifically, this research examined the increase of students' rule-learning when exposed to advance organizers presented in a CAVI mediated lesson

A case study of the evaluation process of a positive action ACCESS training scheme

The purpose of the study was to determine the problems which arose when carrying out a largely non-directive qualitative evaluation process of a non-traditional ACCESS training scheme for women. The evaluation process was designed to include a formative and summative evaluation. The formative evaluation was to include self-reports from the participants of the course which were to be analysed as the course progressed. The summative evaluation was to include the self-reports and was to be supplemented with reports on the participants development as assessed by the life skills and work skills tutors. An additional section of the summative evaluation was to determine whether the objectives and projected outcomes were achieved. The evaluation study exposed three major areas of concern: the basic design; especially data collection and analysis, the question of how the evaluation can best benefit the participants of the programme, and the importance of establishing a non-hierarchical relationship between the evaluator and the participants. The problems during the evaluation arose out of basic design faults, lack of time available to carrying out the evaluation process, and lack of material collected from the tutors on the course, Although the evaluation process broke down the ensuing case study on the problems experienced has proved to be a valuable topic for discussion. Through the analysis of the evaluation process a number of important issues have been raised which could be valuable as a guideline for other qualitative evaluators when they are designing a qualitative evaluation process

The learning ensemble: musical learning through participation

This thesis is an examination of the learning processes employed by adults who learn to play an instrument within an ensemble. The alms of the research were threefold. Firstly, to discover how a person learns in a group and what the role of the socio-cultural environment is in learning. Secondly, to investigate the role that identity plays in learning and whether the students regard themselves as musicians. Finally, to explore the role of the performance in the musical learning process. The research has been carried out using case-study research and a four-year autoethnographic study. The theoretical framework is provided by literature from the fields of cultural psychology, music psychology and adult learning. Activity Theory has been used as the main analytical tool. The discussion firstly considers the learning process in order to construct an activity system of musical learning within an ensemble. Then, using this activity system, the motivational factors inherent in the learning ensemble and the role of Identity In generating motivation are considered. Through analysing motivation and Identity in relation to the activity system, I have demonstrated how the activity system can be developed into a three-dimensional system by Incorporating Identity as a constituent, thus stabilising the activity system. A three-dimensional system then allows for multiple activities to be analysed through the construction of activity constellations. The result of this study is a model of participative learning. Participative learning takes into consideration the purpose of learning and the socio-cultural environment so that musical learning is embedded in social music making. This then provides music education with a new model for learning a musical Instrument

Acquisition of New Knowledge In TutorJ

This paper presents a methodology to acquire new knowledge in TutorJ using external information sources. TutorJ is an ITS whose architecture is inspired to the HIPM cognitive model, while meta-cognition principles have been used to design the knowledge acquisition process. The system behavior is intended to increase its own knowledge as a consequence of the interaction with users. The implemented methodology uses external links and services to capture new knowledge from contents related to discussion topics and transforms these contents into structured knowledge that is stored inside an ontology. The purpose of the proposed methodology is to lower the effort of system scaffolding creation and to increase the level of interaction with users. The focus is on self-regulated learners while meta-cognitive strategies have to bee defined to adapt and to increase the effectiveness of tutoring actions

Acquisition of New Knowledge to Manage Conversation in TutorJ

This paper presents new conversation modules developed for TutorJ to support the use of meta-cognitive strategies in the learners. TutorJ is an Intelligent Tutoring System able to interact with users to assess their skills, and improve their knowledge in a specific domain. New models are devoted to plan the conversation and to acquire new knowledge from semi-structured data sources. Conversation planning is based on probabilistic techniques. Knowledge acquisition is based on retrieval, transformation and alignment of data from wikis to enrich the replies to students questions