Examination of Eco-Behavioral Assessments Designed for Understanding Complex Behaviors and Environments.

Second-generation intervention research requires methods for overcoming challenges to understanding complex learning ecologies and interactions of students. Eco-behavioral assessments (EBAs) are one solution to past intervention research challenges. EBAs record the effects of ecological variables in students’ behavior and daily interactions. The utility of EBAs in second-generation research has increased substantially. Numerous EBAs now exist for use with all ages of learners and provide a valid, reliable, and cost effective method for intervention research. This paper examines 18 EBAs as well as software systems designed to support and enhance the use of EBAs. The examination serves as a comprehensive resource to better understand how EBAs can be used in answering complex questions about students’ learning and for advancing second-generation research

Understanding Cognition Across Modalities for the Assessment of Digital Resources

Drawing from the theories of the cognitive process, this paper explores the transmission, retention and transformation of information across oral, written, and digital modes of communication and how these concepts can be used to examine the assessment of digital resource tools. The exploration of interactions across modes of communication is used to gain an understanding of the interaction between the student, digital resource and teacher. Cognitive theory is considered as a basis for the assessment of digital resource tools. Lastly, principles for the assessment of digital resource tools are presented along with how assessment can be incorporated in the educational practice to enhance learning in higher education

Aligning Recommendation and Conversation via Dual Imitation

Human conversations of recommendation naturally involve the shift of interests which can align the recommendation actions and conversation process to make accurate recommendations with rich explanations. However, existing conversational recommendation systems (CRS) ignore the advantage of user interest shift in connecting recommendation and conversation, which leads to an ineffective loose coupling structure of CRS. To address this issue, by modeling the recommendation actions as recommendation paths in a knowledge graph (KG), we propose DICR (Dual Imitation for Conversational Recommendation), which designs a dual imitation to explicitly align the recommendation paths and user interest shift paths in a recommendation module and a conversation module, respectively. By exchanging alignment signals, DICR achieves bidirectional promotion between recommendation and conversation modules and generates high-quality responses with accurate recommendations and coherent explanations. Experiments demonstrate that DICR outperforms the state-of-the-art models on recommendation and conversation performance with automatic, human, and novel explainability metrics.Comment: EMNLP 202

Warranting Arguments, the Virtue of Verb

The Uses of Argument presented Stephen Toulmin’s call for a working logic and the classical statement of his layout of argument. In chapter 3, which explicated the model, each element was defined using multiple strategies. Toulmin presented his terminology both as a category system for labeling statements or propositions and as a functional vocabulary to describe ‘what . . . is involved in establishing conclusions by the production of arguments’ (97). These two uses of the vocabulary did not come together seamlessly in his account, however. Nor have they done so in subsequent work. Interpretations and elaborations of the Toulmin model, including Toulmin’s own with Rieke and Janek in An Introduction to Reasoning, have tended to characterize the overall model functionally but have defined and illustrated the elements as different kinds of statements. This paper calls for more attention to a definition for the ‘warrant’ element that emerges from the dialogue strategy of definition: ‘to warrant’ as a verb capturing the movement between the data and the claim. The paper argues that the result of this perspective is a more rhetorically based statement of the Toulmin model