Understanding Constraint-Based Processes: A Precursor to Conceptual Change in Physics

Chi (1992; Chi and Slotu, 1993; Slotta, Chi and Joram, 1995) suggests that students experience difficulty in learning certain physics concepts because they inappropriately attribute these concepts with the ontology of material substances(MS). According to accepted physics theory, these concepts (e.g., light, heat, electric current) are actually a special type of process that Chi (1992) calls "Constraint-Based Interactions" (CBI). Students cannot understand the process-like nature of these concepts because of their bias towards substance-like conceptions, and also because they are unfamiliar with the CBI ontology. Thus, conceptual change can be facilitated by providing students with some knowledge of the CBI ontology before they receive the relevant physics instruction. This CBI training was provided by means of a computer-based instructional module in which students manipulated simulations as they read an accompanying text concerning four attributes of the CBI ontology. A control group simply read a (topically similar) text from the computer screen. The two groups then studied a physics textbook concerning concepts of electricity, and performed a post-test which was assessed for evidence of conceptual change. As a result of their training in the CBI ontology, the experimental group showed significant evidence of conceptual change with regards to the CBI concept of electric current

Conceptual change challenges in medicine during professional development

This study investigates professional development during medical studies from a conceptual change perspective. Medical students’ conceptual understanding and clinical reasoning concerning the central cardiovascular system were investigated during the first three years of study. Professional development was inspected from the perspectives of biomedical knowledge, clinical knowledge and skills needed to solve a patient case. Biomedical misconceptions regarding false beliefs and mental models were detected. Students with misconceptions were more likely to give lower level answers in clinical application tasks and to make inaccurate diagnoses compared to those students who had accurate conceptual understanding. Based on the results, pedagogical suggestions are discussed.This study investigates professional development during medical studies from a conceptual change perspective. Medical students’ conceptual understanding and clinical reasoning concerning the central cardiovascular system were investigated during the first three years of study. Professional development was inspected from the perspectives of biomedical knowledge, clinical knowledge and skills needed to solve a patient case. Biomedical misconceptions regarding false beliefs and mental models were detected. Students with misconceptions were more likely to give lower level answers in clinical application tasks and to make inaccurate diagnoses compared to those students who had accurate conceptual understanding. Based on the results, pedagogical suggestions are discussed.Peer reviewe

Learnersourcing Personalized Hints

Personalized support for students is a gold standard in education, but it scales poorly with the number of students. Prior work on learnersourcing presented an approach for learners to engage in human computation tasks while trying to learn a new skill. Our key insight is that students, through their own experience struggling with a particular problem, can become experts on the particular optimizations they implement or bugs they resolve. These students can then generate hints for fellow students based on their new expertise. We present workflows that harvest and organize studentsâ collective knowledge and advice for helping fellow novices through design problems in engineering. Systems embodying each workflow were evaluated in the context of a college-level computer architecture class with an enrollment of more than two hundred students each semester. We show that, given our design choices, students can create helpful hints for their peers that augment or even replace teachersâ personalized assistance, when that assistance is not available

Towards an Intelligent Tutor for Mathematical Proofs

Computer-supported learning is an increasingly important form of study since it allows for independent learning and individualized instruction. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to developing an intelligent tutoring system for teaching textbook-style mathematical proofs. We characterize the particularities of the domain and discuss common ITS design models. Our approach is motivated by phenomena found in a corpus of tutorial dialogs that were collected in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. We show how an intelligent tutor for textbook-style mathematical proofs can be built on top of an adapted assertion-level proof assistant by reusing representations and proof search strategies originally developed for automated and interactive theorem proving. The resulting prototype was successfully evaluated on a corpus of tutorial dialogs and yields good results.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453