Lessons Learned in a Math Excel Workshop: The Importance of Maintaining High Cognitive Demands

Uri Treisman\u27s Emerging Scholars Workshop model has been implemented on many college campuses over the last twenty years. The Treisman model is based on groups of students meeting regularly in a social atmosphere to work collaboratively in solving challenging mathematics problems related to their introductory coursework. Emerging Scholars Programs (or Math Excel as it is called in many settings, including ours) have been particularly successful in increasing the academic success and participation of underrepresented groups in mathematics. The primary responsibilities of a workshop leader include the design of a session’s worksheet, as well as the facilitation of students\u27 problem solving efforts during the workshop session itself. In this paper, we discuss a mathematical tasks framework proposed by researchers in the Quantitative Understanding: Amplifying Student Achievement and Reasoning (QUASAR) project that may be especially helpful to workshop leaders in making a successful implementation of Math Excel. This framework emphasizes the notion of the cognitive demand of a mathematical task. The level of cognitive demand is not a static attribute and may well change as students undertake a task in a classroom setting. QUASAR researchers noted how the initially high demands of a task may not be maintained in the classroom, and how teachers\u27 actions may lower the demands and consequently limit learning opportunities for students. Although the QUASAR project involved middle school mathematics instruction, we believe that this mathematical tasks framework can provide valuable lessons for Math Excel workshop leaders, and it suggests how critically important both the choice of problem tasks and the workshop leaders’ facilitation of student work can be. In this paper, we review the mathematical tasks framework and illustrate its application to scenarios actually encountered in our Math Excel workshops

Supporting Design Thinking Through a Game-Based Pedagogy in Entrepreneurship Education

Design thinking is an important concept presented in entrepreneurship education. However, the cognitive aspect of design thinking has been neglected by business teaching and learning practices. The aim of this paper is to present a game-based pedagogy to support the cognitive aspect of design thinking and to promote this approach as an alternative to predictive and adaptive pedagogies that are still dominant in entrepreneurial learning. To disseminate our pedagogical approach, we designed and presented experiential learning activities in a workshop format. In this workshop, the participants took part in ludic tasks such as gameplay and board game design to enhance their comprehension about entrepreneurship through design thinking

Form and visual cues: A Workshop for graduate design students

Product development timelines are shrinking and simultaneously, products are becoming more complicated. Designers have little time to allow products to iteratively evolve into their most intuitive forms. The result for the consumer is often a steep learning curve via thick instruction manuals, cheat sheets and quick-start guides. In contrast, an object such as a water pitcher contains virtually all the information needed to successfully use it right away; everything is either communicated by the form itself or quickly discovered through simple explorations. In 2001-2003, when I attended RIT, the graduate industrial design curriculum did not include a class solely based on design principles. Many graduate ID students at RIT come from other disciplines with limited exposure to design principles or theories of cognitive psychology. So after research into the work of Christopher Alexander, Irving Biederman, JJ Gibson, Rudolph Arnhiem, and Donald Norman, etc. I created a one-day graduate workshop to teach a number of related design principles and cognitive psychology theories towards more effectively using physical form to improve a product\u27s semantics. This paper describes the workshop material as well as student work created in the workshop. Successful application of the workshop material by the students who attended suggests that RIT ID graduate students would benefit from a full quarter class based on these theories and principles

Healthcare professional and patient co-design and validation of a mechanism for service users to feedback patient safety experiences following a care transfer: a qualitative study

Objective: To develop and validate a mechanism for patients to provide feedback on safety experiences following a care transfer between organisations. Design: Qualitative study using participatory methods (co-design workshops) and cognitive interviews. Workshop data were analysed concurrently with participants and cognitive interviews were thematically analysed using a deductive approach based on the developed feedback mechanism. Participants: Expert patients (n=5) and healthcare professionals (n=11) were recruited purposively to develop the feedback mechanism in two workshops. Workshop one explored principles underpinning safety feedback mechanisms, and workshop two included the practical development of the feedback mechanism. Final design and content of the feedback mechanism (a safety survey) were verified by workshop participants, and cognitive interviews (n=28) were conducted with patients. Results: Workshop participants identified that safety feedback mechanisms should be patient-centred, short and concise with clear signposting on how to complete, with an option to be anonymous and balanced between positive (safe) and negative (unsafe) experiences. The agreed feedback mechanism consisted of a survey split across three stages of the care transfer; departure, journey and arrival. Care across organisational boundaries was recognised as being complex, with healthcare professionals acknowledging the difficulty implementing changes that impact other organisations. Cognitive interview participants agreed the content of the survey was relevant but identified barriers to completion relating to the survey formatting and understanding of a care transfer. Conclusions: Participatory, co-design principles helped overcome differences in understandings of safety in the complex setting of care transfers when developing a safety survey. Practical barriers to the survey’s usability and acceptability to patients were identified, resulting in a modified survey design. Further research is required to determine the usability and acceptability of the survey to patients and healthcare professionals, as well as identifying how governance structures should accommodate patient feedback when relating to multiple health or social care providers. Strengths and limitations of the study: This study developed a safety survey using participatory and co-design methods to bring together patient and healthcare professional perspectives. Cognitive interviews with 28 patients were used to validate and further refine the survey format and questions. Further research is required to pilot the survey to determine whether patients would be willing to be engaged in reporting their experiences of safety following a transfer in care. Due to the nature of organisational care transfers, which potentially include large numbers of organisations, it is unlikely that participants represented all possible types of transfers that patients experience. It was not possible to explore further the governance relationships that exist between different organisations responsible for patients’ care, which could impact on the implementation of the survey into practice

Design Thinking for Cyber Deception

Cyber deception tools are increasingly sophisticated but rely on a limited set of deception techniques. In current deployments of cyber deception, the network infrastructure between the defender and attacker comprises the defence/attack surface. For cyber deception tools and techniques to evolve further they must address the wider attack surface; from the network through to the physical and cognitive space. One way of achieving this is by fusing deception techniques from the physical and cognitive space with the technology development process. In this paper we trial design thinking as a way of delivering this fused approach. We detail the results from a design thinking workshop conducted using deception experts from different fields. The workshop outputs include a critical analysis of design provocations for cyber deception and a journey map detailing considerations for operationalising cyber deception scenarios that fuse deception techniques from other contexts. We conclude with recommendations for future research

Attention and Visibility in an Information Rich World

As the rate of content production grows, we must make a staggering number of daily decisions about what information is worth acting on. For any flourishing online social media system, users can barely keep up with the new content shared by friends. How does the user-interface design help or hinder users' ability to find interesting content? We analyze the choices people make about which information to propagate on the social media sites Twitter and Digg. We observe regularities in behavior which can be attributed directly to cognitive limitations of humans, resulting from the different visibility policies of each site. We quantify how people divide their limited attention among competing sources of information, and we show how the user-interface design can mediate information spread.Comment: Appearing in 2nd International Workshop on Social Multimedia Research 2013, in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2013

A machine consciousness approach to autonomous mobile robotics

Proceeding of: 5th International Cognitive Robotics Workshop, 2006 (The AAAI '06 Workshop on Cognitive Robotics). Boston, Massachusetts, USA, July 16-17, 2006.In this paper we argue that machine consciousness can be successfully modelled to be the base of a control system for an autonomous mobile robot. Such a bio-inspired system provides the robot with cognitive benefits the same way that consciousness does for humans and other higher mammals. The key functions of consciousness are identified and partially applied to an original computational model, which is implemented in a software simulated mobile robot. We use a simulator to prove our assumptions and gain insight about the benefits that conscious and affective functions add to the behaviour of the robot. A particular exploration problem is analyzed and experiments results are evaluated. We conclude that this cognitive approach involving consciousness and emotion functions cannot be ignored in the design of mobile robots, as it provides efficiency and robustness in autonomous tasks. Specifically, the proposed model has revealed efficient control behaviour when dealing with unexpected situations.Publicad

Teaching Case Conceptualization Skills to Clinical Mental Health Students to Enhance Clinical Competency and Cognitive Complexity

A primary purpose of counselor education is the development of competency in diagnosis, case conceptualization, treatment formulation, and intervention. This paper describes a series of experiential case-based workshops designed to directly target and enhance students’ understanding of these specific clinical mental health counseling competencies in order to promote student involvement in constructivist learning, develop students’ cognitive complexity, and elucidate the thinking of an experienced clinician. This paper provides an overview of the workshop design and implementation, discussion of workshop efficacy with examples, and suggestions for curricular implementation

Proposal of fuzzy logic-based students' learning assessment model

The cognitive diagnosis is defined as the abstract process of gathering information about the student's learning and transforming that information based on instructional decisions. A model that captures the expert knowledge of experienced professors and is used to design a cognitive diagnostic model based on Fuzzy Logic is presented in this article. Particularly, a diagnosis system with four variables (three input variables and one output variable) and 27 fuzzy rules.Eje: Workshop Tecnología informática aplicada en educación (WTIAE)Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Designing Attention-Centric Notification Systems: Five HCI Challenges

Through an examination of the emerging domain of cognitive systems, with a focus on attention-centric cognitive systems used for notification, this document explores the human-computer interaction challenges that must be addressed for successful interface design. This document asserts that with compatible tools and methods, user notification requirements and interface usability can be abstracted, expressed, and compared with critical parameter ratings; that is, even novice designers can assess attention cost factors to determine target parameter levels for new system development. With a general understanding of the user tasks supported by the notification system, a designer can access the repository of design knowledge for appropriate information and interaction design techniques (e.g., use of color, audio features, animation, screen size, transition of states, etc), which have analytically and empirically derived ratings. Furthermore, usability evaluation methods, provided to designers as part of the integrated system, are adaptable to specific combinations of targeted parameter levels. User testing results can be conveniently added back into the design knowledge repository and compared to target parameter levels to determine design success and build reusable HCI knowledge. This approach is discussed in greater detail as we describe five HCI challenges relating to cognitive system development: (1) convenient access to basic research and guidelines, (2) requirements engineering methods for notification interfaces, (3) better and more usable predictive modeling for pre-attentive and dual-task interfaces, (4) standard empirical evaluation procedures for notification systems, and (5) conceptual frameworks for organizing reusable design and software components. This document also describes our initial work toward building infrastructure to overcome these five challenges, focused on notification system development. We described LINK-UP, a design environment grounded on years of theory and method development within HCI, providing a mechanism to integrate interdisciplinary expertise from the cognitive systems research community. Claims allow convenient access to basic research and guidelines, while modules parallel a lifecycle development iteration and provide a process for requirements engineering guided by this basic research. The activities carried out through LINK-UP provide access to and interaction with reusable design components organized based on our framework. We think that this approach may provide the scientific basis necessary for exciting interdisciplinary advancement through many fields of design, with notification systems serving as an initial model. A version of this document will appear as chapter 3 in the book Cognitive Systems: Human Cognitive Models in Systems Design edited by Chris Forsythe, Michael Bernard, and Timothy Goldsmith resulting from a workshop led by the editors in summer 2003. The authors are grateful for the input of the workshop organizers and conference attendees in the preparation of this document