概念マップと確信度情報に基づく適応的フィードバックに関する研究

広島大学(Hiroshima University)博士(工学)Doctor of Engineeringdoctora

Designing tools and interventions for a more engaging formative feedback process

textTo teach effectively, teachers rely on feedback from their students. But students often dislike conventional forms of feedback such as taking tests or answering questions in front of their peers. For my MFA thesis project, I have designed tools that k-12 educators can use to elicit formative feedback, even from quiet and reserved students and those who do not feel their feedback is of value. My overarching intent with these lowstakes, low-tech, inexpensive tools is to improve teaching and learning. By giving teachers tools that generate useful feedback in a way that is low-stakes for the students, all students are given a voice. Through this design process, I also developed some generalizable principles about the way in which good formative feedback can be elicited in learning environments.Desig

An investigation into university teachers’ and students' perceptions of problem solving in physics in higher education in Saudi Arabia

This study was conducted to investigate university teachers’ and students' perceptions of problem solving in physics in higher education in Saudi Arabia. The current study took into consideration the sociocultural notion that context is an important contributor to the learning process and impacts on the interaction between people. This study focused on aspects of the context, such as community, school, university, language, syllabus and classroom practices, that influence students’ learning of problem-solving in physics. An explanatory sequential mixed methods approach was used to collect data using two questionnaires (the Force Concept Inventory test and the Mechanics Base Line Test), semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and think aloud protocols. The study sample consisted of 31 participants in total, including ten preparatory-year students, eleven first-year students, five preparatory-year teachers and five first-year teachers. The findings revealed that students found difficulty in understanding problems; they did not seem to know how to implement the steps of problem-solving (understanding the problem, devising the plan, carrying out the plan and looking back). Moreover, this study revealed that a number of social and cultural aspects played an essential role in influencing these students’ learning of problem-solving in physics. The study also revealed that students were fearful of asking their teachers questions when they did not understand. Likewise, this study emphasised the important role of providing a safe classroom environment to create social interaction between students and their teachers, and between students themselves, in order to enable students to think and access assistance to their performance, whether from their teacher or peers. Subsequently, this assistance improved students’ understanding in physics lectures and their understanding of physics problems. Also, the study highlighted that a number of linguistic issues, such as the teacher’s dialect or the use of English as medium of instruction, were an obstacle to students’ understanding of mechanics problems, thereby causing an additional cognitive burden. In addition, this study found that students seemed not to have the opportunity to get assistance, such as in the form of feedback or questioning from their teachers, due to the huge number of students in the class, which prevented teachers from guiding students’ thinking while solving physics problems. It was also found that students’ comprehension of Newtonian concepts was inadequate for successful problem-solving due to a lack of basic physics knowledge

Serious Toys: Teaching Computer Science Concepts to Pre-Collegiate Students

Advancements in science and engineering have driven innovation in the United States for more than two centuries. The last several decades have brought to the forefront the importance of such innovation to our domestic and global economies. To continue to succeed in this information-based, technologically advanced society, we must ensure that the next generation of students are developing computational thinking skills beyond what was acceptable in past years. Computational thinking represents a collection of structured problem solving skills that cross-cut educational disciplines. There is significant future value in introducing these skills as early as practical in students\u27 academic careers. Over the past four years, we have developed, piloted, and evaluated a series of outreach modules designed to introduce fundamental computing concepts to young learners. Each module is based on a small embedded device a \u27serious toy\u27 designed to simultaneously engage visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners through lectures, visual demonstrations, and hands-on activities. We have piloted these modules with more than 770 students, and the evaluation results show that the program is having a positive impact. The evaluation instruments for our pilots consist of pre- and post-attitudinal surveys and pre- and post-quizzes. The surveys are designed to assess student attitudes toward computer science and student self-efficacy with respect to the material covered. The quizzes are designed to assess students\u27 content understanding. In this dissertation, we describe the modules and associated serious toys. We also describe the module evaluation methods, the pilot groups, and the results for each pilot study

Technologies to enhance self-directed learning from hypertext

With the growing popularity of the World Wide Web, materials presented to learners in the form of hypertext have become a major instructional resource. Despite the potential of hypertext to facilitate access to learning materials, self-directed learning from hypertext is often associated with many concerns. Self-directed learners, due to their different viewpoints, may follow different navigation paths, and thus they will have different interactions with knowledge. Therefore, learners can end up being disoriented or cognitively-overloaded due to the potential gap between what they need and what actually exists on the Web. In addition, while a lot of research has gone into supporting the task of finding web resources, less attention has been paid to the task of supporting the interpretation of Web pages. The inability to interpret the content of pages leads learners to interrupt their current browsing activities to seek help from other human resources or explanatory learning materials. Such activity can weaken learner engagement and lower their motivation to learn. This thesis aims to promote self-directed learning from hypertext resources by proposing solutions to the above problems. It first presents Knowledge Puzzle, a tool that proposes a constructivist approach to learn from the Web. Its main contribution to Web-based learning is that self-directed learners will be able to adapt the path of instruction and the structure of hypertext to their way of thinking, regardless of how the Web content is delivered. This can effectively reduce the gap between what they need and what exists on the Web. SWLinker is another system proposed in this thesis with the aim of supporting the interpretation of Web pages using ontology based semantic annotation. It is an extension to the Internet Explorer Web browser that automatically creates a semantic layer of explanatory information and instructional guidance over Web pages. It also aims to break the conventional view of Web browsing as an individual activity by leveraging the notion of ontology-based collaborative browsing. Both of the tools presented in this thesis were evaluated by students within the context of particular learning tasks. The results show that they effectively fulfilled the intended goals by facilitating learning from hypertext without introducing high overheads in terms of usability or browsing efforts