Human Factors in Agile Software Development

Through our four years experiments on students' Scrum based agile software development (ASD) process, we have gained deep understanding into the human factors of agile methodology. We designed an agile project management tool - the HASE collaboration development platform to support more than 400 students self-organized into 80 teams to practice ASD. In this thesis, Based on our experiments, simulations and analysis, we contributed a series of solutions and insights in this researches, including 1) a Goal Net based method to enhance goal and requirement management for ASD process, 2) a novel Simple Multi-Agent Real-Time (SMART) approach to enhance intelligent task allocation for ASD process, 3) a Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) based method to enhance emotion and morale management for ASD process, 4) the first large scale in-depth empirical insights on human factors in ASD process which have not yet been well studied by existing research, and 5) the first to identify ASD process as a human-computation system that exploit human efforts to perform tasks that computers are not good at solving. On the other hand, computers can assist human decision making in the ASD process.Comment: Book Draf

Harnessing AI to Power Constructivist Learning: An Evolution in Educational Methodologies

This article navigates the confluence of the age-old constructivist philosophy of education and modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools as a means of reconceptualizing teaching and learning methods. While constructivism champions active learning derived from personal experiences and prior knowledge, AI’s adaptive capacities seamlessly align with these principles, offering personalized, dynamic, and enriching learning avenues. By leveraging AI platforms such as ChatGPT, BARD, and Microsoft Bing, educators can elevate constructivist pedagogy, fostering enhanced student engagement, self-reflective metacognition, profound conceptual change, and an enriched learning experience. The article further emphasizes the preservation of humanistic values in the integration of AI, ensuring a balanced, ethical, and inclusive educational environment. This exploration sheds light on the transformative potential of inter-twining traditional educational philosophies with technological advancements, paving the way for a more responsive and effective learning paradigm

Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic review

Chatbots hold the promise of revolutionizing education by engaging learners, personalizing learning activities, supporting educators, and developing deep insight into learners’ behavior. However, there is a lack of studies that analyze the recent evidence-based chatbot-learner interaction design techniques applied in education. This study presents a systematic review of 36 papers to understand, compare, and reflect on recent attempts to utilize chatbots in education using seven dimensions: educational field, platform, design principles, the role of chatbots, interaction styles, evidence, and limitations. The results show that the chatbots were mainly designed on a web platform to teach computer science, language, general education, and a few other fields such as engineering and mathematics. Further, more than half of the chatbots were used as teaching agents, while more than a third were peer agents. Most of the chatbots used a predetermined conversational path, and more than a quarter utilized a personalized learning approach that catered to students’ learning needs, while other chatbots used experiential and collaborative learning besides other design principles. Moreover, more than a third of the chatbots were evaluated with experiments, and the results primarily point to improved learning and subjective satisfaction. Challenges and limitations include inadequate or insufficient dataset training and a lack of reliance on usability heuristics. Future studies should explore the effect of chatbot personality and localization on subjective satisfaction and learning effectiveness

A theoretical and practical approach to a persuasive agent model for change behaviour in oral care and hygiene

There is an increased use of the persuasive agent in behaviour change interventions due to the agent‘s features of sociable, reactive, autonomy, and proactive. However, many interventions have been unsuccessful, particularly in the domain of oral care. The psychological reactance has been identified as one of the major reasons for these unsuccessful behaviour change interventions. This study proposes a formal persuasive agent model that leads to psychological reactance reduction in order to achieve an improved behaviour change intervention in oral care and hygiene. Agent-based simulation methodology is adopted for the development of the proposed model. Evaluation of the model was conducted in two phases that include verification and validation. The verification process involves simulation trace and stability analysis. On the other hand, the validation was carried out using user-centred approach by developing an agent-based application based on belief-desire-intention architecture. This study contributes an agent model which is made up of interrelated cognitive and behavioural factors. Furthermore, the simulation traces provide some insights on the interactions among the identified factors in order to comprehend their roles in behaviour change intervention. The simulation result showed that as time increases, the psychological reactance decreases towards zero. Similarly, the model validation result showed that the percentage of respondents‘ who experienced psychological reactance towards behaviour change in oral care and hygiene was reduced from 100 percent to 3 percent. The contribution made in this thesis would enable agent application and behaviour change intervention designers to make scientific reasoning and predictions. Likewise, it provides a guideline for software designers on the development of agent-based applications that may not have psychological reactance

Learning in evolutionary environments

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Measuring What Matters Most

An argument that choice-based, process-oriented educational assessments are more effective than static assessments of fact retrieval.If a fundamental goal of education is to prepare students to act independently in the world—in other words, to make good choices—an ideal educational assessment would measure how well we are preparing students to do so. Current assessments, however, focus almost exclusively on how much knowledge students have accrued and can retrieve. In Measuring What Matters Most, Daniel Schwartz and Dylan Arena argue that choice should be the interpretive framework within which learning assessments are organized. Digital technologies, they suggest, make this possible; interactive assessments can evaluate students in a context of choosing whether, what, how, and when to learn.Schwartz and Arena view choice not as an instructional ingredient to improve learning but as the outcome of learning. Because assessments shape public perception about what is useful and valued in education, choice-based assessments would provide a powerful lever in this reorientation in how people think about learning.Schwartz and Arena consider both theoretical and practical matters. They provide an anchoring example of a computerized, choice-based assessment, argue that knowledge-based assessments are a mismatch for our educational aims, offer concrete examples of choice-based assessments that reveal what knowledge-based assessments cannot, and analyze the practice of designing assessments. Because high variability leads to innovation, they suggest democratizing assessment design to generate as many instances as possible. Finally, they consider the most difficult aspect of assessment: fairness. Choice-based assessments, they argue, shed helpful light on fairness considerations

Leadership as Teaching: Mapping the Thinking of Administrators and Teachers

Leading and teaching both involve processes that permit others to transform their thinking. Yet there has been little systematic, empirical research to connect the two. This exploratory study examines K-12 educational leadership asking: What are the similarities and differences in the ways school administrators think about leading compared to the ways teachers think about teaching ? This mixed methods study offers an examination of whether administrators think about their work in terms of the vital teaching role of leadership (Burns, 1978, p. 425) by creating and comparing three sets of concept maps, one for teachers and administrators and one for each of the two groups disaggregated. Two participant samples provided the data. Focus group members generated 100 statements, and card sorting participants rated and categorized the concepts. Concept mapping (Trochim, 2005) produced maps with geographic clusters that revealed patterns of thinking. Clusters fell into two geographic segments: Personal and Extra-Personal. The concept of holding environment (Kegan, 1982, 1994; Heifetz, 1994) and its components, challenge and support, provided a construct for the maps\u27 interpretations. Disaggregating the rating data and statistical analyses revealed areas of similarity and differences suggesting: 1) administrators and teachers strongly value the Personal (Support) aspects of their work; 2) both rate the Extra-Personal cluster Create some tension lower than other aspects of their work; 3) administrators rate the Extra-Personal (Challenge) aspects of their work higher than teachers; and 4) administrators rate the Extra-Personal clusters Political awareness and Using evidence and data significantly higher than teachers. Disaggregating the data to create separate maps for administrators and teachers reveals a dimension, the Intra-Personal, that appears only on the administrators\u27 map. Disaggregated data show that administrators rate the concept cluster Challenge the Status Quo least important of all other areas of their work. These findings can inform the work of school change agents and administrator development programs. Research recommendations include creating maps of business or political leaders\u27 thinking using the 100 teaching concepts, and developing cognitive maps of individual administrators using think-aloud interviews during sorting and rating procedures. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible at the OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.ed