Exploring Formative Feedback on Textual Assignments with the Help of Automatically Created Visual Representations

Learners, particularly lifelong learners, often find it difficult to determine the scope of their expertise. Formative feedback could help them do so. To use this feedback productively, it is essential to then suggest to them the remedial actions they need to overcome the gaps in their knowledge. This paper presents the design considerations of a support tool that aims at providing formative feedback on textual assignments. It does so by facilitating comparisons between learner’s input texts and group input texts with respect to the intended learning outcomes. Using language technologies, the tool automatically extracts the concepts and relations of input texts; it then creates visual representations that can be put side by side to identify conceptual overlaps and missing concepts. The paper first introduces the theoretical underpinnings of the tool – specifically those concerning expertise development, knowledge creation and assessment of knowledge. It then draws up design considerations and clarifies how the tool should work. Next, it discusses the results of an initial study in which word clouds and concept maps have been applied to generate graphical visual representations. These help learners identify overlapping and missing core concepts, both in individual texts and in a compiled group text. Finally, the paper provides conclusions and directions for future work

Developing a Theoretical Framework for Visualization-Based Pedagogical Content Knowledge (V-PCK) Based on Middle School Teachers’ Views and Uses of Visualizations as an Instructional Tool

Visualizations is a categorical term that is often used to provide visual imagery to the communication of processes, concepts, exemplar phenomena, and general information. Objects such as graphs, tables, diagrams, animations, and pictures fall in this category. Existing literature focuses primarily on the use of visualizations in the science field at the high school level, collegiate levels, and in pre-service teacher education programs. A gap in the literature exists which examines how science teachers at the middle school level perceive and use visualizations as instructional components in the classroom. The purpose of this study was to examine science teachers views on the barriers and facilitators that guided visualization-based instruction in middle school science classrooms. Participants in this study included three science teachers from a small urban middle school in the Southern region of the United States. Grounded theory was used to collect data through semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, lesson plan analysis, card sorting tasks, and a learning style inventory. Data was deductively coded to determine trends which resulted in the development of the theory, Visualization-based Pedagogical Content Knowledge (V-PCK). Results also indicated that while teachers viewed visualizations in a positive manner, their use of visualizations were limited to methods that produced little to no new student knowledge. Integration into the classroom was heavily influenced by the classroom environment and teachers’ previous experiences with visualizations. The findings of this study indicated there is a need for professional development opportunities in this area to better allow teachers to utilize visualizations as a teaching and learning tool in the middle school science classroom

The Case for a Contemplative Philosophy of Education

I argue for the use of contemplative practices, such as meditation, journaling, reflection, etc., as an adjunct or alternative form of pedagogy that can help enrich student engagement, facilitate the creation of a philosophical mind state, and engender intrinsic curiosity and related psychological and/or motivational qualities that are supportive of educational ideals. I report on my own scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research performed in my philosophy classes, as a case study in point. I found that the more times students in my different philosophy courses meditated, the more their subjective responses changed on surveys about their philosophical attitudes and beliefs

Effective Use of Visualization in Education

With the ever increasing use of computers, visualization is used more and more. Powerpoint-fatigue is a well-known fact. There’s a general feeling that supportive technologies can be useful and effective in education, however those outcomes are often not achieved. Consequently people start to look for alternatives: movies, animations and infographics, have become common-practice. These are all powerful and valuable tools, also in education. It is very important though to ask what type of tool to use, for which kind of learning and to which purpose. In this article we attempt to derive a taxonomy which will help to make sound choices, so that visualization can be used effectively

Untangling the Web of Historical Thinking: What the Structures of Student-Produced Wikis Reveal

During the past decade, most educators have focused on the collaborative aspects of wikis and how they enable us to collectively create web content. Our focus has been different.We are interested in the ways using wikis to structure information helps students learn the complex thinking skills necessary for understanding history as a web of knowledge rather than linear. We are also interested in the information about how and when students cross concept thresholds made visible by the interconnections of the different pages in a wiki. Using Luminotes, a rudimentary, yet elegant open-source wiki, students can represent--and, we theorize, better understand--the ways that knowledge in the discipline of history is constructed. By the end of the grant period we hope to demonstrate that wikis can be broadly used as a powerful tool for structuring the rich, relational character of knowledge in history (and, potentially, other humanities disciplines) and for better understanding student learning

Estimating Color-Concept Associations from Image Statistics

To interpret the meanings of colors in visualizations of categorical information, people must determine how distinct colors correspond to different concepts. This process is easier when assignments between colors and concepts in visualizations match people's expectations, making color palettes semantically interpretable. Efforts have been underway to optimize color palette design for semantic interpretablity, but this requires having good estimates of human color-concept associations. Obtaining these data from humans is costly, which motivates the need for automated methods. We developed and evaluated a new method for automatically estimating color-concept associations in a way that strongly correlates with human ratings. Building on prior studies using Google Images, our approach operates directly on Google Image search results without the need for humans in the loop. Specifically, we evaluated several methods for extracting raw pixel content of the images in order to best estimate color-concept associations obtained from human ratings. The most effective method extracted colors using a combination of cylindrical sectors and color categories in color space. We demonstrate that our approach can accurately estimate average human color-concept associations for different fruits using only a small set of images. The approach also generalizes moderately well to more complicated recycling-related concepts of objects that can appear in any color.Comment: IEEE VIS InfoVis 2019 ACM 2012 CSS: 1) Human-centered computing, Human computer interaction (HCI), Empirical studies in HCI 2) Human-centered computing, Human computer interaction (HCI), HCI design and evaluation methods, Laboratory experiments 3) Human-centered computing, Visualization, Empirical studies in visualizatio

Representational transformations : using maps to write essays

This research was supported by NSERC (The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) RGPIN-2020-04401 and EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) EP/T518062/1.Essay-writing is a complex, cognitively demanding activity. Essay-writers must synthesise source texts and original ideas into a textual essay. Previous work found that writers produce better essays when they create effective intermediate representations. Diagrams, such as concept maps and argument maps, are particularly effective. However, there is insufficient knowledge about how people use these intermediate representations in their essay-writing workflow. Understanding these processes is critical to inform the design of tools to support workflows incorporating intermediate representations. We present the findings of a study, in which 20 students planned and wrote essays. Participants used a tool that we developed, Write Reason, which combines a free-form mapping interface with an essay-writing interface. This let us observe the types of intermediate representations participants built, and crucially, the process of how they used and moved between them. The key insight is that much of the important cognitive processing did not happen within a single representation, but instead in the processes that moved between multiple representations. We label these processes `representational transformations'. Our analysis characterises key properties of these transformations: cardinality, explicitness, and change in representation type. We also discuss research questions surfaced by the focus on transformations, and implications for tool designers.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

ChatGPT: ascertaining the self-evident. The use of AI in generating human knowledge

The fundamental principles, potential applications, and ethical concerns of ChatGPT are analyzed and discussed in this study. Since ChatGPT emerged, it has gained a rapidly growing popularity, with more than 600 million users today. The development of ChatGPT was a significant mile-stone, as it demonstrated the potential of large-scale language models to generate natural language responses that are almost indistinguishable from those of a human. ChatGPT's operational principles, prospective applications, and ability to advance a range of human endeavours are discussed in the paper. However, much of the work discusses and poses moral and other problems that rely on the subject. To document the latter, we submitted 14 queries and captured the ChatGPT responses. ChatGPT appeared to be honest, self-knowledgeable, and careful with its answers. The authors come to the realization that since AI is already a part of society, the pervasiveness of the ChatGPT tool to the general public has once again brought to light concerns regarding AI in general. Still, they have moved from the domain of scientific community collective reflection at a conceptual level to everyday practice this time.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure