Students’ Understanding of Their Student Model. In

Abstract. Open Learner Models (OLM) are believed to facilitate students' metacognitive activities in learning. Inspectable student models are a simple but very common form of OLM that grant students opportunities to get feedback on their knowledge and reflect on it. This paper uses individualized surveys and interviews with high school students who have at least three years experience learning with the Cognitive Tutor regarding the inspectable student model in the Tutor. We also interviewed a teacher. We found that: i) students pay close attention to the OLM and report that seeing it change encourages them to learn; ii) there is a significant discrepancy between the students' self-assessment and the system's assessment; iii) students generally rely on the OLM to make judgments of their learning progress without much active reflection. We discuss potential revisions to the student model based on the findings, which aim to enhance students' reflection on and self-assessment of their own learning

The impact of social performance visualization on students

Over the last 10 years two major research directions explored the benefits of visualizing student learning progress. One stream of research on learning performance visualization attempts to build a visual presentation of students' learning progress, targeting the needs of instructors and academic advisors. The other stream of research on Open Student Modeling (OSM) attempts to visualize the state of individual student's knowledge and present the visualization directly to the student. The results of the studies in that area show that, presenting students with basic representation of their knowledge will result in facilitating their metacognitive activities and promoting self-reflection and awareness. This paper tries to study the impact of a more sophisticated form of performance visualization on students. We believe that our visualization tool can positively influence students by granting them the opportunity to get a view of their performance in the content of the class progress. Moreover, we tried to boost their motivation by building a positive sense of competition using a representation of average class performance. In this paper we present study comparing two groups of students, one using the visualization and another without visualization. The results of the study shows that: 1) the students are likely to use the social visualization tool during the whole semester to monitor their progress in comparison with their peers; 2) the visualization tool encourages students to use the learning materials in a more continuous manner during the whole semester and 3) students will achieve a higher success rate in answering self-assessment quizzes. © 2012 IEEE

A student-facing dashboard for supporting sensemaking about the brainstorm process at a multi-surface space

© 2017 Association for Computing Machinery. All rights reserved. We developed a student-facing dashboard tuned to support posthoc sensemaking in terms of participation and group effects in the context of collocated brainstorming. Grounding on foundations of small-group collaboration, open learner modelling and brainstorming at large interactive displays, we designed a set of models from behavioural data that can be visually presented to students. We validated the effectiveness of our dashboard in provoking group reflection by addressing two questions: (1) What do group members gain from studying measures of egalitarian contribution? and (2) What do group members gain from modelling how they sparked ideas off each other? We report on outcomes from a study with higher education students performing brainstorming. We present evidence from i) descriptive quantitative usage patterns; and ii) qualitative experiential descriptions reported by the students. We conclude the paper with a discussion that can be useful for the community in the design of collective reflection systems

Learner models in online personalized educational experiences: an infrastructure and some experim

Technologies are changing the world around us, and education is not immune from its influence: the field of teaching and learning supported by the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), also known as Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), has witnessed a huge expansion in recent years. This wide adoption happened thanks to the massive diffusion of broadband connections and to the pervasive needs for education, highly connected to the evolution in sciences and technologies. Therefore, it has pushed up the usage of online education (distance and blended methodologies for educational experiences) to, even in lately years, unexpected rates. Alongside with the well known potentialities, digital-based educational tools come with a number of downsides, such as possible disengagement on the part of the learner, absence of the social pressures that normally exist in a classroom environment, difficulty or even inability from the learners to self-regulate and, last but not least, depletion of the stimulus to actively participate and cooperate with lectures and peers. These difficulties impact the teaching process and the outcomes of the educational experience (i.e. learning process), being a serious limit and questioning the broader applicability of TEL solutions. To overcome these issues, there is a need of tools to support the learning process. In the literature, one of the known approach to improve the situation is to rely on a user profile, that collects data during the use of the eLearning platforms or tool. The created profile can be used to adapt the behaviour and the contents proposed to the learner. On top of this model, some researches stressed the positive effects stimulated by the disclosure of the model itself for inspection purposes by the learner. This disclosed model is known as Open Learner Model (OLM). The idea of opening learners' profile and eventually integrate them with external on-line resources is not new and it has the ultimate goal of creating global and long-run indicators of the learner's profile. Also the representation aspect of the learner model plays a role, moving from the more traditional approach based on the textual and analytic/extensive representation to the graphical indicators that are able to summarise and to present one or more of the model characteristics in a way that is considered more effective and natural for the user consumption. Relying on the same learner models, and stressing the different aggregation and representation capabilities, it is possible to either support self-reflection of the learner or to foster the tutoring process to allow proper supervision by the tutor/teacher. Both the objectives can be reached through the graphical representation of the relevant information, presented in different ways. Furthermore, with such an open approach for the learner model, the concepts of personalisation and adaptation acquire a central role in the TEL experience, overcoming the previous limits related to the impossibility to observe and explain to the learner the reasons for such an intervention from the tool itself. As a consequence, the introduction of different tools, platforms, widgets and devices in the learning process, together with the adaptation process based on the learner profiles, can create a personal space for a potential fruitful usage of the rich and widespread amount of resources available to the learner. This work aimed at analysing the way a learner model could be represented in visual presentation to the system users, exploring the effects and performances for learners and teachers. Subsequently, it concentrated in investigating how the adoption of adaptive and social visualisations of OLM could affect the student experience within a TEL context. The motivation was twofold. On one side was to show that the approach of mixing data from heterogeneous and not already related data sources could have a meaningful didactic interpretations, whether on the other one was to measure the perceived impact of the introduction on online experiences of the adaptivity (and of social aspects) in the graphical visualisations produced by such a tool. In order to achieve these objectives, the present work analysed and addressed them through an approach that merged user data in learning platforms, implementing a learner profile. This was accomplished by means of the creation of a tool, named GVIS, to elaborate on the collected user actions in platforms enabling remote teaching. A number of test cases were performed and analysed, adopting the developed tool as the provider to extract, to aggregate and to represent the data for the learners' model. The GVIS tool impact was then estimated with self- evaluation questionnaires, with the analysis of log files and with knowledge quiz results. Dimensions such as the perceived usefulness, the impact on motivation and commitment, the cognitive overload generated, and the impact of social data disclosure were taken into account. The main result found by the application of the developed tool in TEL experiences was to have an impact on the behaviour of online learners when used to provide them with indicators around their activities, especially when enhanced with social capabilities. The effects appear to be amplifies in those cases where the widget usage is as simplified as possible. From the learner side, the results suggested that the learners seem to appreciate the tool and recognise its value. For them the introduction as part of the online learning experience could act as a positive pressure factor, enhanced by the peer comparison functionality. This functionality could also be used to reinforce the student engagement and positive commitment to the educational experience, by transmitting a sense of community and stimulating healthy competition between learners. From the teacher/tutor side, they seemed to be better supported by the presentation of compact, intuitive and just-in-time information (i.e. actions that have an educational interpretation or impact) about the monitored user or group. This gave them a clearer picture of how the class is currently performing and enabled them to address performance issues by adapting the resources and the teaching (and learning) approach accordingly. Although a drawback was identified regarding the cognitive overload, the data collected showed that users generally considered this kind of support useful. There is also indications that further analyses can be interesting to explore the effects introduced in the teaching practices by the availability and usage of such a tool

Making Sense of Long-Term Physical Activity Tracker Data: The challenge of Incompleteness

Millions of people have already collected weeks, months and even years of data about their own health and physical activity levels. The potential is enormous for use in personal applications as well as for public health analysis of large populations at low cost. However, the reality is many people fail to wear their tracker and record data all day every day especially over the long-term. The resulting incompleteness in data poses an important challenge for interpreting long-term tracker data, in terms of both making sense of it and in dealing with the uncertainty of inferences based on it. Surprisingly, there has been little work into defining the problem, its extent and how it should be measured and addressed. This thesis tackles this key challenge and we demonstrate the need for a term to describe and quantify this challenge. We introduce the term, adherence, which quantifies the completeness in such data. We also offer interface designs that accounted for adherence to support self-monitoring and reflection. Bringing these together, we provide broader definitions and guidelines for incorporating adherence when making sense of long-term physical activity tracker data, both in personal applications and in public health research results. This thesis is based on three studies. First is a semester-long study of tracker use by 237 University students. Second is a study of 21 existing long-term physical activity trackers and provided the first richly qualitative exploration of physical activity and adherence of such users. It also evaluated the iStuckWithIt, a long-term physical activity data user interface, and reported on insights gained within and as aided by a tutorial and reflection scaffolding. In the final study, we drew on 12 diverse datasets, for 753 users, with over 77,000 days with data and 73,000 days missing to explore the impact of different definitions of adherence and methods for dealing with its implications

Open social student modeling in competency-based education

Ph.D