Data-driven misconception discovery in constraint-based intelligent tutoring systems

Students often have misconceptions in the domain they are studying. Misconception identification is a difficult task but allows teachers to create strategies to appropriately address misconceptions held by students. This project investigates a data-driven technique to discover students' misconceptions in interactions with constraint-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems(ITSs). This analysis has not previously been done. EER-Tutor is one such constraint-based ITS, which teaches conceptual database design using Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) data modelling. As with any ITS, a lot of data about each student's interaction within EER-Tutor are available: as individual student models, containing constraint histories, and logs, containing detailed information about each student action. This work can be extended to other ITSs and their relevant domains

Eye Tracking and Studying Examples: How Novices and Advanced Learners Study SQL Examples

Eye tracking provides information about a user’s eye gaze movements. For many years, eye tracking has been used in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Similarly, research on computerised educational systems also relies heavily on students’ interactions with systems, and therefore eye tracking has been used to study and improve learning. We have recently conducted several studies on using worked examples in addition to scaffolded problem solving. The goal of the project reported in this paper was to investigate how novices and advanced students learn from examples. The study was performed in the context of SQL-Tutor, a mature Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that teaches SQL. We propose a new technique to analyse eye-gaze patterns named EGPA. In order to comprehend an SQL example, students require the information about tables’ names and their attributes which are available in a database schema. Thus, if students paid attention to the database schema, they would understand SQL examples more easily. We analysed students’ eye movement data from different perspectives, and found that advanced students paid more attention to database schema than novices. In future work, we will use the findings from this study to provide proactive feedback or individualised amounts of information

The Role of the Tutor in the Resilience of the Post-Bankruptcy Entrepreneur: The Case of the 60.000 Rebonds Association

Entrepreneurs’ post-failure recovery has previously been approached from the perspective of individual resilience. This recovery dynamic involves interactions between the entrepreneurs and their environment. Our paper studies the role of the tutor as an active external support in the entrepreneur’s resilience process. We consider the case of an association that supports entrepreneurs who have filed for bankruptcy and show how the tutor regulates the entrepreneur’s post-failure resilience process, involving other stakeholders to form a resilience system. We also show how the tutor must manage its image within this system in the interests of the recovering entrepreneurs

Valuing diversity and establishing an approach to supporting excluded groups

Minority students and minority employees in Higher Engineering Education experience inequality. For academic staff these inequalities impact their personal development and career progression. To continue to grow and for engineering education to thrive as a professional discipline we must encourage diversity within both the student and staff populations. This paper cautions against a simple notion of diversity, rather a truly diverse culture within engineering is needed, one in which there is diversity of opportunity, diversity of thought and diversity of experience. To enable a more inclusive environment to flourish we must understand the scale of the inequalities which exist. However, this paper demonstrates that there are significant limitations to the current diversity data within the UK which leaves room for under-reporting and over-generalising. In addition, there are cultural challenges which give further likelihood to non-disclosure and lack of self-reporting. This paper proposes that further research is needed into the true lack of diversity within engineering and describes one example of a ‘thought experiment’ conducted by the researchers to start unpacking the data and highlighting the scale of the issue