Carole R. Beal

University of Pittsburgh | Pitt · School of Computing and Information

Introduction Participants’ perspectives are valuable in evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention. Methods Interviews were conducted with teachers of students with visual impairments and students who completed an intervention designed to build graphics literacy skills. Results Six themes were identified with corresponding subthemes. The int...

Introduction Developing graphicacy skills is important for students with visual impairments if they are to succeed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) content. Teachers of students with visual impairments report that they lack resources to use in teaching students graphicacy skills. Methods Forty-one students with visual im...

Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are increasingly used at-scale in educational contexts to facilitate teaching and promote learning, and the data they produce can be used for educational research purposes. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology has repeatedly emphasized the importance of using evidence to...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of student-generated drawing and imagination on learning recall, learning transfer, and cognitive load, and also students’ attitudes towards the learning strategies when learning a computer-based science text, compared to learning with provided pictures. The study used three groups: drawing group...

Although the use of technology in the K12 classroom has been shown to have a positive impact, research on the use of open education resources (OER) is relatively limited, especially research focusing on low‐achieving students. The present study examines the relationship between usage of Algebra Nation, a self‐guided system that provided instruction...

We study the usage of a self-guided online tutoring platform called Algebra Nation, which is widely by middle school and high school students who take the End-of-Course Algebra I exam at the end of the school year. This article aims to study how the platform contributes to increasing students' exam scores by examining users' logs over a three year...

We study the impact of an online tutoring program, AnimalWatch, for algebra readiness on mathematics achievements of grade 6 students. We use the data from a randomized experimental design conducted on 69 teachers and 2025 students in California in the academic years 2011-2012. After a brief description of the experimental design and the system imp...

Structured abstract: Introduction: Knowing how to gather information from graphics and to use that information to solve mathematics problems is an important skill. Prior research indicates that many students with visual impairments face considerable challenges when attempting to locate information in math graphics. Little is known about how teacher...

Introduction The authors examined a tablet computer application (iPad app) for its effectiveness in helping students studying pre-algebra to solve mathematical word problems. Methods Forty-three visually impaired students (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) completed eight alternating mathematics units presented using their tradition...

The answering of any test represents a challenge for students; however, foreign students whose first language is not English have to deal with the difficulty of the understanding of a series of questions written on a different language in addition of the effort required to solve the problem. In this study, we recorded the behavior of the brain sign...

Introduction The present study evaluated the feasibility of using an iPad application or “app” for algebra-readiness mathematics, with accompanying braille materials and accessible graphics, when used in authentic educational settings. Methods Twenty-nine students with visual impairments in grades 4–11 used the materials under the direction of the...

Math word problem solving in an online tutoring system was compared for high school students who were native speakers of English (English primary) and their peers who were learning English (English learners). Word problems were written in English, the language of instruction. Data records for word problems that had been solved by students in both l...

When elementary school children first learn to write, they often find it difficult to think of things to say. One hypothesis is that young writers rely on a conversational model of communication and find it difficult to generate content in the absence of a conversational partner. The present experiment was designed to learn if a dialogue writing ta...

Purpose: The present study examined the relationship between mathematics and language to better understand the nature of the deficit and the academic implications associated with specific language impairment (SLI) and academic implications for English language learners (ELLs). Method: School-age children (N = 61; 20 SLI, 20 ELL, 21 native monoli...

“Citizen science” refers to the emerging practice in which individuals in the community, often en masse, partner with researchers to assist with data collection, analysis or interpretation. Such partnerships benefit researchers through access to data at a scale not possible for individuals or small teams. To date, the benefits to the citizen scient...

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 105(4) of Journal of Educational Psychology (see record 2013-35422-001). In the article “Introduction to the Special Issue on Advanced Learning Technologies” by Vincent Aleven, Carole R. Beal, and Arthur C. Graesser ( Journal of Educational Psychology, Advance online publication. S...

Reports an error in "Introduction to the Special Issue on Advanced Learning Technologies" by Vincent Aleven, Carole R. Beal and Arthur C. Graesser (Journal of Educational Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, Sep 9, 2013, np). In the article “Introduction to the Special Issue on Advanced Learning Technologies” by Vincent Aleven, Carole R. Beal,...

The AnimalWatch tutoring system provides students with instruction in algebra readiness problem solving, including basic computation, fractions, variables and expressions, basic statistics and simple geometry. Students solve word problems that include authentic environmental science content, and can access a range of multimedia resources that provi...

Learning trajectories have been developed for 1650 students who solved a series of online chemistry problem solving simulations using quantitative measures of the efficiency and the effectiveness of their problem solving approaches. These analyses showed that the poorer problem solvers, as determined by item response theory analysis, were modifying...

13 Abstract—Teach Ourselves is an online collaborative learning environment designed to engage middle school students with math and science through the inclusion of peer-to-peer activities and game-like components. Students learn from and teach each other as they solve and create math and science word problems, and earn points and badges. An explor...

This study was conducted to determine whether Spanish-enhanced administration of a standardized math assessment would result in improved scores for English Learners who used Spanish as a heritage language. Twenty-one typically developing second-graders (English Learners) were administered the traditional KeyMath-3. If the child made an error on an...

The study goal was to evaluate whether Electroencephalography (EEG) estimates of attention and cognitive workload captured as students solved math problems could be used to predict success or failure at solving the problems. Students (N = 16) solved a series of SAT math problems while wearing an EEG headset that generated estimates of sustained att...

The theory of problem posing in mathematics education suggests that there are motivational and cognitive benefits for students from creating their own problems, yet such activities are not typically integrated into the traditional classroom. A field study was conducted to learn if middle school students (N = 224) could successfully create math and...

While young children have been characterized as drawing what they know rather than what they see, recent research has shown that they can make view-specific drawings under some task conditions. The goals of this experiment were first, to learn if 5-year-old children would draw and select view-specific pictures of a mug with its handle turned out of...

Students interacted with an intelligent tutoring system to learn grammatical rules for an artificial language. Six tutoring policies were explored. One, based on a Dynamic Bayes’ Network model of skills, was learned from the performance of previous students. Overall, this policy and other intelligent policies outperformed random policies. Some poli...

Fourteen students with visual impairments in Grades 5–12 participated in the field-testing of AnimalWatch-VI-Beta. This computer program delivered 12 prealgebra math problems and hints through a self-voicing audio feature. The students provided feedback about how the computer program can be improved and expanded to make it accessible to all users....

Prior research suggests that linguistic complexity may impede mathematics word problem solving by English Learners, but results have been inconsistent. The present study employed an experimental design to investigate the effects of linguistic complexity and mathematics difficulty on word problem solving by middle school English Learners. Results we...

Three studies were conducted with middle school students to evaluate a web-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for arithmetic and fractions. The studies involved pre and post test comparisons, as well as group comparisons to assess the impact of the ITS on students' math problem solving. Results indicated that students improved from pre to post...

Problem solving was compared for English Learners and English Primary students who had used Animal Watch, an algebra-readiness ITS. Data records for word problems solved by students in both language groups were located and compared. Results indicated that English Learners were less likely to answer correctly, had more incorrect answer attempts, too...

The study focused on the relationship of English proficiency and math performance in a sample of high school students, including 47% English language learners (ELLs). Data sources included state math test scores, study-specific pre- and posttest scores, problem solving in an online math tutorial, and responses to a self-report assessment of mathema...

ABSTRACT Current trends in ecological research emphasize interdisciplinary approaches for assessing effects of present and predicted environmental changes. One such emerging interdisciplinary field is the discipline of ecohydrology, which studies the feedbacks and interactions between ecological and hydrological processes. However, interdisciplinar...

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) acquire rich data about students' behavior during learning; data mining techniques can help to describe, interpret and predict student behavior, and to evaluate progress in relation to learning outcomes. This paper surveys a variety of data mining techniques for analyzing how students interact with ITSs, includin...

Learning trajectories have been developed for 1650 students who solved a series of online chemistry problem solving simulations using quantitative measures of the efficiency and the effectiveness of their problem solving approaches. These analyses showed that the poorer problem solvers, as determined by item response theory analysis, were modifying...

There has been growing interest in designing online learning systems that are accessible to learners with special needs. In this project, an existing online math word problem solving system was modified for use by blind students. Text-to-speech technology was used to present math word problems in audio format, and to provide audio feedback to stude...

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) acquire rich data about students' behavior during learning; data mining techniques can help to describe, interpret and predict student behavior, and to evaluate progress in relation to learning outcomes. We describe applications of data mining to challenges related to finding patterns in student actions at the lev...

The study was conducted to investigate the relation of adolescent students' mathematics motivation and achievement to their appropriate help-seeking and inappropriate guessing behaviour while using instructional software. High school students (n = 90) completed brief assessments of mathematics motivation and then worked with software for geometry i...

This research was funded under a Thrust D award to develop algorithms for gist memory. Gists are abstractions that preserve the important causal events in activities or episodes, eliding details. The point of this research was to develop a new kind of representation, image schemas, and associated learning methods. The learning agent was called Jean...

Europe and the U.S. both face the challenges of urban schools with low-achieving adolescent learners, many of whom are not proficient in the language of instruction. This paper describes the deployment and evaluation of the AnimalWatch intelligent tutoring system for mathematics in challenging classrooms. Previous studies demonstrated that AnimalWa...

Bringing users into the process of content development may help to reduce the time and cost associated with tutoring system development, and may benefit users by deepening their understanding of the domain. We describe a pilot effort with middle school students who successfully authored word problems for the AnimalWatch intelligent tutoring system...

We report the results of a controlled evaluation of an interactive on-line tutoring system for high school math achievement test problem solving. High school students (N = 202) completed a math pre-test and were then assigned by teachers to receive interactive on-line multimedia tutoring or their regular classroom instruction. The on-line tutored s...

Jean is a model of early cognitive development based loosely on Piaget's theory of sensori-motor and pre-operational thought. Like an infant, Jean repeatedly executes schemas, gradually transfer- ring them to new situations and extending them as necessary to accommodate new experiences. We model this process of accommodation with the Ex- perimental...

The current paper focuses on modeling actions of high school students with a mathematics tutoring system with Hidden Markov Models. The results in- dicated that including a hidden state estimate of learner engagement increased the accuracy and predictive power of the models, both within and across tutoring ses- sions. Groups of students with distin...

Students' actions while working with a tuoring system were used to generate estimates of learning goals, specifically, the goal of learning by using multimedia help resources, and the goal of learning through independent problem solving. A Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) model was trained with interface action and inter-action interval latency data...

The efficacy of a tutoring system for pre-algebra instruction plus human tutoring was compared to instruction provided to small groups of middle school students by experienced human math tutors, with instructional time held constant. Students completed pre- and post-tests of computation, fractions, algebra and rational numbers skills. Results indic...

Students do not always use efficient strategies to solve scientific problems. Students' motivation beliefs were assessed through an on-line survey instrument, along with performance on easy and challenging multimedia science problem sets. Results indicated that female students reported lower self-efficacy and higher concerns about their performance...

Jean is a model of early cognitive development based loosely on Pi- aget's theory of sensori-motor and pre-operational thought (1). Like an infant, Jean repeatedly executes schemas, gradually extending its schemas to accommo- date new experiences. Jean's environment is a simulated "playpen" in which Jean and other objects move about and interact. J...

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) can provide effective instruction, but learners do not always use such systems effectively. In the present study, high school students' action sequences with a mathematics ITS were machine- classified into five finite-state machines indicating guessing strategies, appropriate help use, and independent problem solv...

As web-enhanced courses become more successful, they put considerable burdens on instructors and teaching assistants. We present our work on developing software tools to support instructors by automatic assessment of pedagogical discussions. We are developing prototype measures of discussion quality that rely on the quantity of discussion contribut...

This paper introduces ISL, a language for representing and manipulating image schemas. ISL supports the rep-resentation of symbolic as well as quantitative dynamic properties of objects and relationships. We have en-coded a number of the image schemas commonly covered in the cognitive linguistics literature and tested them in three domains: pattern...

This research evaluated the impact of supplementing user models with additional data about cognitive features of the student. Supplemental data included individual differences variables such as: developmental stage of the learner (Piagetian), spatial ability, math-facts-retrieval and gender. These differences were applied along with multimedia and...

Research suggests that multimedia and individualization of instruction are both effective ways to teach new material. This paper describes the integration of information about individual student cognitive characteristics into an intelligent tutor for high school geometry. The tutor presents a breadth of geometry problems with multimedia animations,...

We develop two related themes, learning proce- dures and knowledge transfer. This paper intro- duces two methods for learning procedures and one for transferring previously-learned knowledge to a slightly different task. We demonstrate by experi- ment that transfer accelerates learning.

Intelligent tutoring systems customize the learning experiences of students. Because no two students have precisely the same learning history, traditional analytic techniques are not appropriate. This paper shows how to compare the learning histories of students and how to compare groups of students in different experimental conditions. A class of...

As web-enhanced courses become more successful, they put considerable burdens on instructors and teaching assistants. We present our work on developing software tools to support instructors by A) semi automatic grading of discussions and B) creating instructional tools that handle many student requests. We are using knowledge-based techniques in mo...

ITS instruction may be enhanced by models of student motivation and mood, in addition to cognitive skills and domain knowledge. In an initial study, self-assessments by high school students of their mathematics motivation and mood showed gender differences in response to ITS instruction, and predicted students' intention to learn from the ITS and u...

Educational content developers, including AIED developers, traditionally make a distinction between formative evaluation and summative evaluation of learning materials. Although the distinction is valid, it is inadequate for many AIED systems because they require multiple types of evaluation and multiple stages of evaluation. Developers of interact...

Intelligent tutoring systems customize the learning experiences of students. Be­ cause no two students have precisely the same learning history, traditional analytic techniques are not appropriate. This paper shows how to compare the learning his­ tories of students and how to compare groups of students in different experimental conditions. A class...

Intelligent tutoring software (ITS) holds great promise for K-12 instruction. Yet it is difficult to obtain rich information about users that can be used in realistic educational delivery settings--public school classrooms--in which eye tracking and other user sensing technologies are not suitable. We are pursuing three "cheap and cheerful" strateg...

Tactical Language Training System helps learners acquire basic communicative skills in foreign languages and cultures. Learners practice their communication skills in a simulated village, where they must develop rapport with the local people, who in turn will help them accomplish missions such as post-war reconstruction. Each learner is accompanied...

Results of an evaluation of students' attitudes and their rela- tionship to student behaviors within a tutoring system are presented. Starting from a correlation analysis that integrates survey-collected stu- dent attitudes, learning variables, and behaviors while using the tutor, we constructed a Bayesian Network that infers attitudes and percepti...

We describe Wayang Outpost, a web-based ITS for the Math sec- tion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). It has several distinctive features: help with multimedia animations and sound, problems embedded in narrative and fantasy contexts, alternative teaching strategies for students of different mental rotation abilities and memory retrieval speeds...

when needed, there have been only preliminary attempts to incorporate knowledge of student group characteristics (e.g., profile of cognitive skills, gender) into the tutor and to use this profile information to guide instruction (Shute, 1995). Objectives. The main goal of the current project is to implement and evaluate a web-based intelligent tuto...

3 experiments were conducted to assess young (5-7 years) children's ability to judge the relative amount that a character would receive if sharing a material with 1 friend (halves) or 2 friends (thirds). Materials included items that appeared in 3 forms: continuous, discrete, and composite. In the first 2 experiments, performance was best with mate...

Previous research has identified two moral orientations in people's reasoning about moral dilemmas: an orientation to rights, fairness, and justice and another based on care, compassion and concern for others and the self. To investigate the association of political violence and ethnic conflict with children's preferred moral orientation, two studi...

We describe our on-going work in the creation of a web-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for the mathematics section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Wayang Oupost focuses on geometry problems, and uses web-based multimedia to communicate concepts to the student. Decisions about problem and help selection made on a remote web server, wh...

We explored the effectiveness of help for 350 students of different genders and cognitive developments, in an arithmetic intelligent tutoring system. We conclude that girls were more sensitive to the amounts of help fitting their needs than to the level of abstraction.

We describe our on-going work in the creation of a web-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for the Math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

We present the results of a deep formative evaluation of AnimalWatch, an intelligent tutor for arithmetic. Students learned with AnimalWatch, and had a positive experience with it. Still, we detected AnimalWatch selected too easy problems. We proposed different hypotheses for this behavior and analyzed the performance of each ITS component, by obse...

The maps-for-verbs framework predicts that our use of verbs to describe simple whole-body interactions is influenced by the characteristics of the physical dynamics in the before, during and after phases of the interaction. We report an initial investigation of this claim in a study in which young children were asked to describe movies of simple in...

to make inferences about each student's knowledge as he or she solves problems (such as a very fine-grained report card). Based on these estimations about how students do in relation to the problems that are given to them, AnimalWatch adjusts its problem selection to give students problems that will challenge them, so that they improve with the hel...

tutor (UMass-Amherst) for arithmetic indicate that student users successfully master specific skills and that their attitudes towards math become more positive as a result of working with the software ( < www.carnegielearning.com >; Arroyo, Beck, Schultz & Woolf, 1999; Beal & Arroyo, in press). However, existing ITS are limited in several ways. Fir...

We describe our on-going work in the creation of a web-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for the Math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Wayang Oupost has several distinctive features: heavy web-based multimedia on the client; decisions about problem and help selection made on a remote web server; modelling of students' cognitive...

We explored the effectiveness of help for 350 students of different genders and cognitive developments, in an arithmetic intelligent tutoring system. We conclude that girls were more sensitive to the amounts of help fitting their needs than to the level of abstraction. On the other hand, boys were affected by the abstraction level, and ignored help...

A theme of the symposium is to explore ways to employ AI to make games more appealing to people who do not enjoy current genres, and to expand the market for interactive entertainment beyond the traditional niche of young male players. We suggest that AI techniques employed in the world of intelligent tutoring to model the user and adjust instructi...

The authors examined the influence of interactive media on children's story memory. First-grade children (6--7-year-olds) experienced a computer-based story in 1 of 4 presentation modes: One group heard only the narration, analogous to radio. A 2nd group saw an audiovisual presentation, analogous to television. A 3rd group viewed the story and inte...

The authors examined the influence of interactive media on children's story memory. First-grade children (6-7-year-olds) experienced a computer-based story in 1 of 4 presentation modes: One group heard only the narration, analogous to radio. A 2nd group saw an audiovisual presentation, analogous to television. A 3rd group viewed the story and inter...

In this paper we claim that meaningful representations can be learned by programs, although today they are almost always designed by skilled engineers. We discuss several kinds of meaning that representations might have, and focus on a functional notion of meaning as appropriate for programs to learn. Specifically, a representation is meaningful if...

In this paper we claim that meaningful representations can be learned by programs, although today they are almost always designed by skilled engineers. We discuss several kinds of meaning that representations mighthave, and focus on a functional notion of meaning as appropriate for programs to learn. Specically, a representation is meaningful if it...

In this paper we claim that meaningful representations can be learned by programs, although today they are almost always designed by skilled engineers. We discuss several kinds of meaning that representations might have, and focus on a functional notion of meaning as appropriate for programs to learn. Specifically, a representation is meaningful if...