Conversations and Perspectives on Peer Feedback for Problem Solving

Peer feedback has been suggested as an avenue to leverage students as partners in their own learning and assessment across many disciplines. However, successful implementation of peer feedback activities may prove challenging if students believe that feedback requires more objective expertise than they possess. Summarizing participant contributions and dialogue from a conversation café session at the 2018 University of Calgary Conference on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching, this paper explores and classifies the common themes in peer feedback in the context of literature on the subject. The most promising areas for future research and practitioner support in scientific problem-solving tasks are highlighted

Cooperative/Collaborative Learning

This book brings together a diverse range of international scholars to highlight recent developments in research on collaborative learning. The emphasis is on research that has a strong evidence base for the work that is presented and includes empirical studies, best evidence synthesis of the relevant research, case studies, and theoretical reports. It also highlights how different technologies have been used to facilitate group interaction, dialogue, and learning. There is much to be gained by sharing and learning about what happens in different disciplines and contexts and how different collaborative pedagogies can be implemented when needed to promote understanding and learning. This book will have strong appeal to pre-service and experienced teachers and researchers who are interested in how different collaborative pedagogies can be embedded in course curricula to promote student engagement and learning

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs