Supporting Students’ Research Writing in Psychology through Argument Diagramming

Arguing for the need for a scientific research study (i.e. writing an introduction to a research paper) poses significant challenges for students. When faced with these challenges, students often generate overly ‘safe’ studies, or replications, or in contrast include no strong support for their hypothesis. Additionally, instruction on argumentation has been slow to integrate into scientific education and discourse. This raises the question—how can we support novice scientists in generating and defending high quality hypotheses? A long history of research supports the affordances provided by spatial representations of complex information, particularly in the sciences. More recently, argument diagramming— the process of spatially representing an argument by its component parts and their relationships— has gained traction in instruction for philosophy, social studies, and law. However, its effectiveness for supporting students in science is relatively untested. Additionally, many of these studies have focused on basic contrasts between diagramming and no diagramming. The purpose of these studies was to test the effectiveness of argument diagrams for supporting students’ resea

The Diagnosticity of Argument Diagrams

Can argument diagrams be used to diagnose and predict argument performance? Argumentation is a complex domain with robust and often contradictory theories about the structure and scope of valid arguments. Argumentation is central to advanced problem solving in many domains and is a core feature of day-to-day discourse. Argumentation is quite literally, all around us, and yet is rarely taught explicitly. Novices often have difficulty parsing and constructing arguments particularly in written and verbal form. Such formats obscure key argumentative moves and often mask the strengths and weaknesses of the argument structure with complicated phrasing or simple sophistry. Argument diagrams have a long history in the philosophy of argument and have been seen increased application as instructional tools. Argument diagrams reify important argument structures, avoid the serial limitations of text, and are amenable to automatic processing. This thesis addresses the question posed above. In it I show that diagrammatic models of argument can be used to predict students' essay grades and that automatically-induced models can be competitive with human grades. In the course of this analysis I survey analytical tools such as Augmented Graph Grammars that can be applied to formalize argument analysis, and detail a novel Augmented Graph Grammar formalism and implementation used in the study. I also introduce novel machine learning algorithms for regression and tolerance reduction. This work makes contributions to research on Education, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Machine Learning, Educational Datamining, Graph Analysis, and online grading

Improving Peer Feedback Prediction: The Sentence Level is Right

Recent research aims to automatically pre-dict whether peer feedback is of high qual-ity, e.g. suggests solutions to identified problems. While prior studies have fo-cused on peer review of papers, simi-lar issues arise when reviewing diagrams and other artifacts. In addition, previous studies have not carefully examined how the level of prediction granularity impacts both accuracy and educational utility. In this paper we develop models for predict-ing the quality of peer feedback regard-ing argument diagrams. We propose to perform prediction at the sentence level, even though the educational task is to la-bel feedback at a multi-sentential com-ment level. We first introduce a corpus annotated at a sentence level granularity, then build comment prediction models us-ing this corpus. Our results show that ag-gregating sentence prediction outputs to label comments not only outperforms ap-proaches that directly train on comment annotations, but also provides useful infor-mation for enhancing peer review systems with new functionality.

Teaching the Process of Science: Faculty Perceptions and an Effective Methodology

Most scientific endeavors require science process skills such as data interpretation, problem solving, experimental design, scientific writing, oral communication, collaborative work, and critical analysis of primary literature. These are the fundamental skills upon which the conceptual framework of scientific expertise is built. Unfortunately, most college science departments lack a formalized curriculum for teaching undergraduates science process skills. However, evidence strongly suggests that explicitly teaching undergraduates skills early in their education may enhance their understanding of science content. Our research reveals that faculty overwhelming support teaching undergraduates science process skills but typically do not spend enough time teaching skills due to the perceived need to cover content. To encourage faculty to address this issue, we provide our pedagogical philosophies, methods, and materials for teaching science process skills to freshman pursuing life science majors. We build upon previous work, showing student learning gains in both reading primary literature and scientific writing, and share student perspectives about a course where teaching the process of science, not content, was the focus. We recommend a wider implementation of courses that teach undergraduates science process skills early in their studies with the goals of improving student success and retention in the sciences and enhancing general science literacy

Survey Says—How to Engage Law Students in the Online Learning Environment

The pandemic experience has made it clear that not everyone loves teaching or learning remotely. Many professors and students alike are eager to return to the classroom. However, our experiences over the last year and a half have also demonstrated the potentials and possibilities of learning online and have caused many professors to recalibrate their approaches to digital learning. While the tools for online learning were available well before March of 2020, many instructors are only now beginning to capitalize on their potential. The author of this article worked in online legal education before the pandemic, utilizing these tools and exploring ways to make the online experience more effective. This article is the result of her research on online legal education prior to the pandemic, which sheds light on future possibilities for online learning in law schools in post-pandemic times. The discussion explores various engagement strategies used by online legal educators, assesses students’ perceptions of those strategies, and examines these findings against the backdrop of existing learning theories. The article contributes to the scholarly literature on legal education and pedagogy by tying empirical evidence of student learning preferences to educational theory and identifying concrete strategies for increasing law student engagement and enjoyment

Beginning Teachers\u27 Perceptions of Preparedness: A Teacher Education Program\u27s Transferability and Impact on The Secondary English/Language Arts Classroom

In October 2009, United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared in a speech to Columbia University’s Teacher’s College that many university teacher preparation programs are outdated and must undergo major reform in order to produce high quality teachers needed to improve academic achievement for all students (U.S. Department of Education, 2009). Duncan stated that “America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change – not evolutionary tinkering” (U.S. Department of Education, 2009, p.2). To improve student success in the classroom, policy makers must understand the key role well-trained teachers play in achieving this goal (Boyd, Lankford, Clothfelter, Ladd & Vigdor, 2004; Loeb, Rockoff, & Wyckoff, 2007; Provasnik & Young, 2003; Rice, 2003; Rivers & Sanders, 2002). This study examined the specific aspects of an English teacher preparation program that beginning teachers implement and rely on in their classrooms on a consistent basis. In addition, this study examines how administrators/department chairs view the pedagogical competence of graduates from the English teacher preparation program. The research questions that guided this study are: (1) How do beginning teachers perceive their preparation for teaching in the urban English Language Arts classroom? (2) How do school administrators perceive the teaching ability of graduates? The participants were graduates of Southern Urban University’s English Education Master’s level program from 2005 – 2008. Data sources included Beginning Teacher Questionnaires, Administrator/Department Chair Questionnaires, in-depth phenomenological interviews with select teachers, observations of select teachers’ practice, “card sort” activity/interview, teacher artifacts and photographs. Data were analyzed inductively using the constant comparative method to determine categories and themes (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Trustworthiness was established through research methods that confirm credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). This study provides insight into how to better educate high quality teachers through the examination of an English teacher preparation programs’ daily effect and impact on their graduates and an examination of school administrators’/department chairs perception of these graduates’ performance in the classroom

Semi-automatic assessment of students' graph-based diagrams

Diagrams are increasingly used in many design methods, and are being taught in a variety of contexts in higher education such as database conceptual design or software design in computer science. They are an important part of many assessments. Currently computer aided assessments are widely used for multiple choice questions. They lack the ability to assess a student’s knowledge in a more comprehensive way, which is required for diagram-type student work. The aim of this research is to develop a semi-automatic assessment framework, which enables the use of computer to support the assessment process of diagrammatic solutions, with the focus of ensuring the consistency of grades and feedback on solutions. A novel trace model, that captures design traces of student solutions, was developed as a part of the framework and was used to provide the matching criteria for grouping the solutions. A new marking style, partial marking, was developed to mark these solution groups manually. The Case-Based Reasoning method is utilised in the framework to mark some of the groups automatically. A guideline for scenario writing was proposed to increase the efficiency of automatic marking. A prototype diagram editor, a marking tool and scenario writing environment were implemented for the proposed framework in order to demonstrate proof of concept. The results of experiments show that the framework is feasible to use in the formative assessment and it provides consistent marking and personalised feedback to the students. The framework also has the potential to significantly reduce the time and effort required by the examiner to mark student diagrams. Although the constructed framework was specifically used for the assessment of database diagrams, the framework is generic enough to be used for other types of graph-based diagram

Epiphany: A Story of Improving Teaching Effectiveness in an Executive MBA Economics Course

This paper discusses the reengineering of an executive MBA economics principles course. Traditional lecture-test structure was changed to a seminar style. Events leading to this change are described. Many years of evaluation results are presented to quantitatively and qualitatively depict the dramatic impacts of the changes. Learning theories that help explain the effects are then discussed, especially as they may help others redesign their teaching methodologies. Non-theoretic learning strategies for students and seven research-based principles for more effective teaching are also presented to help explain the results achieved

Teaching about diverse families through case studies and authentic performance assessment

Authentic performance assessment connects active learning pedagogy with assessment of student learning. For family sciences, authentic performance assessment presents an opportunity to evaluate knowledge and skills related to working with families within the classroom context. This form of assessment can be combined with popular teaching strategies, like using family case studies, to provide application and context for course content. This article reviews the literature on authentic performance assessment and its application in the family science literature, and provides an example of an authentic performance assessment in a course on understanding and working with diverse families. The discussion provides suggestions for instructors in family science considering a shift from traditional to authentic assessment