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Publications (98)
Educational games benefit from incorporating evidence-based learning principles. Most of these principles have been studied in conventional learning settings, and their applicability and possible benefits to games is unclear. Two such principles within the general framework of Desirable Difficulties are Spacing and Interleaving. Both refer to the i...
Interactive simulations encourage students to practice skills essential to understanding and learning sciences. Alas, inquiry learning with interactive simulations is challenging. In this paper, we seek to identify inquiry patterns across topics and evaluate their stability with regard to common behaviors and student membership. Applying a clusteri...
Educational games benefit from incorporating evidence-based learning principles. Most of these principles have been studied in conventional learning settings, and their applicability and possible benefits to games is unclear. Two such principles within the general framework of Desirable Difficulties are Spacing and Interleaving. Both refer to the i...
Understanding phenomena by exploring complex interactions between variables is a challenging task for students of all ages. While the use of simulations to support exploratory learning of complex phenomena is common, students still struggle to make sense of interactive relationships between factors. Here we study the applicability of Problem Solvin...
Self-regulated learning (SRL) is crucial for helping students attain high academic performance and achieve their learning objectives in the online learning context. However, learners often face challenges in properly applying SRL in online learning environments. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) applications have shown promise in...
A frequent concern about constructivist instruction is that it works well, mainly for students with higher domain knowledge. We present findings from a set of two quasi-experimental pretest-intervention-posttest studies investigating the relationship between prior math achievement and learning in the context of a specific type of constructivist ins...
Personalization in education describes instruction that is tailored to learners’ interests, attributes, or background and can be applied in various ways, one of which is through choice. In choice-based personalization, learners choose topics or resources that fit them the most. Personalization may be especially important (and under-used) with diver...
We present the design and evaluation of an institutional support model for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL): the SoTL Seed Program. In this model, faculty from across disciplines partner with graduate students with expertise in educational and social science methodologies to implement SoTL investigations. We interviewed and obtained...
Example-based learning refers to a pedagogy in which learners are provided with a step-by-step solution to novel problems early in the learning process. Worked examples are most effective when used in tandem with open problems. However, there are still questions regarding the ordering of examples and problems. We compared the effect of sequencing e...
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems offer effective support for online learning and teaching, including personalizing learning for students, automating instructors’ routine tasks, and powering adaptive assessments. However, while the opportunities for AI are promising, the impact of AI systems on the culture of, norms in, and expectations about in...
User engagement has become a much-cited construct in human-computer interaction (HCI) design and evaluation research and practice. Constructed as a positive and desirable outcome of users' interactions, more frequent and longer interactions are considered evidence of engagement. Disengagement, when discussed, is considered a best avoided outcome of...
This article describes the design and evaluation of an online, asynchronous tool that mirrors the beneficial peer instruction process currently conducted in face-to-face classrooms. In the online Peer Instruction tool, students respond to a multiple-choice question with an answer and explanation. They are then exposed to peer responses to the same...
Learning with online video is pervasive in higher education. Recent research has explored the importance of student engagement when learning with video in online and blended courses. However, little is known about students’ goals and intents when engaging with video. Furthermore, there is limited empirical evidence on the impact of learning context...
This two-volume set LNAI 12748 and 12749 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2021, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in June 2021.*
The 40 full papers presented together with 76 short papers, 2 panels papers, 4 industry papers, 4 doctoral consortium, and 6 workshop...
This two-volume set LNAI 12748 and 12749 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2021, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in June 2021.*
The 40 full papers presented together with 76 short papers, 2 panels papers, 4 industry papers, 4 doctoral consortium, and 6 workshop...
Video-based learning (VBL) is widespread; however, there are numerous challenges when teaching and learning with video. For instructors, creating effective instructional videos takes considerable time and effort. For students, watching videos can be a passive learning activity. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve the VBL exper...
While first-year biology students failed to answer conceptual questions on their own, these experiences helped them learn better. Sunita Chowrira and colleagues at the University of British Columbia took a different approach to teaching cell-biology topics. In their classroom, students first struggled to solve complex problems, which primed them to...
Purpose
Students in flipped classrooms are challenged to orchestrate an increasingly heterogeneous collection of learning objects, including audiovisual materials as well as traditional learning objects, such as textbooks and syllabi. This study aims to examine students' information practices interacting with and synthesizing across learning object...
While video becomes increasingly prevalent in educational settings, current research has yet to investigate what feedback instructors need regarding their students' engagement and learning despite video technologies being equipped to provide viewing analytics and collect student feedback. In this paper we investigate instructors' requirements from...
During inquiry learning with virtual labs students are invited to construct mathematical models that capture key features of the underlying structures. However, students typically fail to construct complete models. In order to identify ways to support learners without restricting them, we look at the literature of Productive Failure and Invention a...
" As videos become increasingly ubiquitous, so is video-based commenting. To contextualize comments, people often reference specific audio/visual content within video. However, the literature falls short of explaining the types of video content people refer to, how they establish references and identify referents, how video characteristics (e.g., g...
It is a well-studied notion that women are under-represented in the physical sciences, with a "leaky pipeline" metaphor describing how the number of women decreases at higher levels in academia[1,2]. It is unclear, however, where the major leaks exist and what factors are responsible for this[2]. Our focus here is on women in physics with an emphas...
As videos are gaining popularity in flipped and blended Engineering classrooms, there is an increasing need to track and understand students’ use of the videos, in order to identify evidence-based practices matched to the emerging trends in video and video annotation tools. We explore students’ surveyresponses, follow-up interviews, and log data fr...
Video-based learning is most effective when students are engaged with video content; however, the literature has yet to identify students' viewing behaviors and ground them in theory. This paper addresses this need by introducing a framework of active viewing, which is situated in an established model of active learning to describe students' behavi...
Control of Variables Strategy (CVS) is the process of isolating the effect of single variables when conducting scientific inquiry. We assess how CVS can help student achieve different levels of understanding when implemented in different parts of the inquiry process. 148 students worked with minimally-guided inquiry activities using virtual labs on...
Learning at Scale is a fast growing field that affects formal, informal, and workplace education. Highly interdisciplinary, it builds on solid foundations in the learning sciences, computer science, education, and the social sciences. We define learning at scale as the study of the technologies, pedagogies, analyses, and theories of learning and te...
As video-based learning is increasingly used in all sectors of education, there is a need for video players that support active viewing practices. We introduce a video player that allows students to mark up video with highlights, tags, and notes in order to personalize their video-based learning experience.
Video is an increasingly popular medium for education. Motivated by the problem of video as a one-way medium, this paper investigates the ways in which learners» active interaction with video materials contributes to active learning. In this study, we examine active viewing behaviors, specifically seeking and highlighting within videos, which may s...
Guiding inquiry learning has been shown to increase knowledge gains. Yet, little is known about the effect of guidance on attitudes and behaviours, its interaction with student attributes, and transfer of impact once guidance is removed. We address these gaps in the context of an interactive Physics simulation on electric circuits (https://phet.col...
Recently, there has been a growing interest in learning approaches that combine two phases: an initial problem-solving phase followed by an instruction phase (PS-I). Two often cited examples of instructional approaches following the PS-I scheme include Productive Failure and Invention. Despite the growing interest in PS-I approaches, to the best of...
Peer feedback is a useful strategy in teaching and learning, but its effectiveness particularly in introductory courses can be limited by the relative newness of students to both the body of knowledge upon which they are being asked to provide feedback and the skill set involved in providing good feedback. This paper applies a novel approach to fac...
Virtual labs are exploratory learning environments in which students learn by conducting inquiry to uncover the underlying scientific model. Although students often fail to learn efficiently in these environments, providing effective support is challenging since it is unclear what productive engagement looks like. This paper focuses on the mining a...
Exploratory learning environments, such as virtual labs, support divergent learning pathways. However, due to their complexity, building computational models of learning is challenging as it is difficult to identify features that (i) are informative with respect to common learning strategies, (ii) abstract similar actions beyond surface differences...
Interactive simulations can facilitate inquiry learning. However, similarly to other Exploratory Learning Environments, students may not always learn effectively in these unstructured environments. Thus, providing adaptive support has great potential to help improve student learning with these rich activities. Providing adaptive support requires a...
Pre-class reading assignments help prepare students for active classes by providing a first exposure to the terms and concepts to be used during class. We investigate if the use of inquiry-oriented PhET-based activities in conjunction with pre-class reading assignments can improve both the preparation of students for in-class learning and student a...
Discussion forums in MOOCs facilitate social support, personalize the learning experience, and provide space for elaboration and clarification. Indeed, research finds positive relationship between participation in learning networks and achievement (Macfadyen & Dawson, 2010; Haythornthwaite & de Laat, 2011). Alas, only 3-5% of MOOC learners particip...
Pre-class reading assignments help prepare students for active classes by providing a first exposure to the terms and concepts to be used during class. We investigate if the use of inquiry-oriented PhET-based activities in conjunction with pre-class reading assignments can improve both the preparation of students for in-class learning and student a...
The field of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) has undergone significant developments over the last twenty-five years. As we reflect on our past and shape our future, we ask two main questions: What are our major strengths? And, what new opportunities lay on the horizon? We analyse 47 papers from three years in the history of the Journal...
Help seeking is an important process in self-regulated learning (SRL). It may influence learning with intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), because many ITSs provide help, often at the student’s request. The Help Tutor was a tutor agent that gave in-context, real-time feedback on students’ help-seeking behavior, as they were learning with an ITS. Ke...
Self‐regulated learning is an ongoing process rather than a single snapshot in time. Naturally, the field of learning analytics, focusing on interactions and learning trajectories, offers exciting opportunities for analyzing and supporting self‐regulated learning. This special section highlights the current state of research at the intersection of...
Providing adaptive support in Exploratory Learning Environments is necessary but challenging due to the unstructured nature of interactions. This is especially the case for complex simulations such as the DC Circuit Construction Kit used in this work. To deal with this complexity, we evaluate alternative representations that capture different level...
Using aggregated Learning Management System data and course evaluation data from 26 online courses, we evaluated the relationship between measures of online activity, course and assessment structure, and student perceptions of course value. We find relationships between selected dimensions of learner engagement that reflect current constructivist t...
Seeking the right level of help at the right time can support learning. However, in the context of online problem-solving environments, it is still not entirely clear which help-seeking strategies are desired. We use fine-grained data from 38 high school students who worked with the Geometry Cognitive Tutor for 2 months to better understand the ass...
Invention activities are Productive Failure activities in which students attempt (and often fail) to invent methods that capture deep properties of a construct before being taught expert solutions. The current study evaluates the effect of scaffolding on the invention processes and outcomes, given that students are not expected to succeed in their...
Data mining techniques have been successfully employed on user interaction data in exploratory learning environments. In this paper we investigate using data mining techniques for analyzing student behaviors in an especially-complex exploratory environment, with over one hundred possible actions at any given point. Furthermore, the outcomes of thes...
While the effect of scaffolding on learning has received much attention, less is known about its effect on students’ strategy use, especially in transfer activities. This study focuses on students’ adaptive behaviours as a function of given scaffolding and when transitioning from a scaffolded to an unstructured activity. We study this in the contex...
This symposium identifies current trends and future directions in research on metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) in educational technologies, and specifically, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). Each paper will elaborate on detection and assessment of metacognition/SRL, forms of support and scaffolding, and self-and co-regulation proc...
We describe a new approach to our first-year lab that has an eight-week formative learning part followed by a summative application in a four-week project. A key feature is that students perform some experiments at home and bring the data to class for discussion and analysis. Performance on our diagnostic test shows that students are generally lear...
Coming to grips with the nature of measurement and uncertainty is often a common but implicit learning goal for many undergraduate physics labs. As educators, our intent is to have students be able to transfer their knowledge to novel situations: we aim to transform novices into experts. In the first-year physics laboratory at UBC, our approach to...
Common wisdom and prior research suggest that students with low prior knowledge are in greater need for scaffolding. However, some forms of scaffolding may overload novice-students' cognitive capacity or short-circuit productive exploration of the problem space. Hence, we evaluate the effectiveness of scaffolding in a virtual simulation in physics,...
Through in-class observations of teaching assistants (TAs) and students in
the lab sections of a large introductory physics course, we study which TA
behaviors can be used to predict student motivation and learning. For the TAs,
we record data to determine how they adhere to and deliver the lesson plan and
how they interact with students during the...
In this chapter, we will discuss our work to understand why students game the system. This work leverages models of student gaming, termed “detectors”, which can infer student gaming in log files of student interaction with educational software. These detectors are developed using a combination of human observation and annotation, and educational d...
Invention activities are Productive Failure activities in which students at- tempt to invent methods that capture deep properties of given data before being taught expert solutions. The current study evaluates the effect of scaffolding on the invention processes and outcomes, given that students are not expected to succeed in their inquiry and that...
Invention and Productive Failure activities ask students to generate methods that capture the important properties of some given data (e.g., uncertainty) before being taught the expert solution. Invention and Productive Failure activities are a class of scientific inquiry activities in that students create, implement, and evaluate mathematical mode...
Learning to think is about transfer. The scope of transfer is essentially a knowledge representation question. Experiences during learning can lead to alternative latent representations of the acquired knowledge, not all of which are equally useful. Productive learning facilitates a general representation that yields accurate behavior in a large va...
Thinking and reasoning, long the academic province of philosophy, have emerged over the past century as core topics of empirical investigation and theoretical analysis in the modern fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. Formerly seen as too complicated and amorphous to be included in early textbooks on the s...
This edited volume provides an overview of the latest advancements in adaptive training technology. Intelligent tutoring has been deployed for well-defined and relatively static educational domains such as algebra and geometry. However, this adaptive approach to computer-based training has yet to come into wider usage for domains that are less well...
Despite the exponential growth of the research on Learning Analytics (LA) and Educational Data Mining (EDM) over the last few years, the work has been still distant from the core Learning Sciences methods, theoretical constructs, and literature. At the same time, over the last 15 years, Learning Sciences as a field has been quite innovative, eclect...
Helping students’ improve their metacognitive and self-regulation skills holds the potential to improve students’ ability
to learn independently. Yet, to date, there are relatively few success stories of helping students enhance their metacognitive
skills using interactive learning environments. In this paper we describe the Self-Assessment Tutor,...
The present research investigated whether immediate metacognitive feedback on students’ help-seeking errors can help students acquire better help-seeking skills. The Help Tutor, an intelligent tutor agent for help seeking, was integrated into a commercial tutoring system for geometry, the Geometry Cognitive Tutor. Study 1, with 58 students, found t...
Invention activities are structured tasks in which students create mathematical methods that attempt to capture deep properties of data (e.g., variability), prior to receiving instruction on canonical methods (e.g., mean deviation). While experiments have demonstrated the learning benefits of invention activities, the mechanisms of transfer remain...
Assessment of students’ self-regulated learning (SRL) requires a method for evaluating whether observed actions are appropriate acts of self-regulation in the specific learning context in which they occur. We review research that has resulted in an automated method for context-sensitive assessment of a specific SRL strategy, help seeking while work...
Exploratory Learning Environments (ELE) facilitate scientific inquiry tasks in which learners attempt to develop or uncover
underlying scientific or mathematical models. Unlike step-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), and due to task characteristics
and pedagogical philosophy, ELE offer little support at the domain level. Lacking adequate sup...
Intelligent Tutoring Systems are widely used coached problem-solving environments (Koedinger, Anderson, Hadley & Mark, 1997; VanLehn, Lynch, Schulze, Shapiro & Shelby, 2005). They are successful, in part, due to their ability to give adaptive feedback (Corbett & Anderson, 2001; Koedinger & Aleven, 2007). More specifically, Intelligent Tutoring Syst...
Exploratory Learning Environments (ELE) are virtual environments that adhere to constructivist theories of learning emphasizing learner control. However, research suggests that lack of sufficient explicit support may undermine their effectiveness. Advanced technologies provide opportunities to supply learners with the right information at the right...
This symposium addresses how different classes of research methods, all based upon the use of log data from educational software, can facilitate the analysis of students' learning strategies and behaviors. To this end, four multi-method programs of research are discussed, including the use of qualitative, quantitative-statistical, quantitative-mode...
Some students, when working in interactive learning environments, attempt to “game the system”, attempting to succeed in the environment by exploiting properties of the system rather than by learning the material and trying to use that knowledge to answer correctly. In this paper, we present a system that can accurately detect whether a student is...
In recent years there has been increasing interest in the phenomena of "gaming the system," where a learner attempts to succeed in an educational environment by exploiting properties of the system's help and feedback rather than by attempting to learn the material. Developing environments that respond constructively and effectively to gaming depend...
Intelligent Tutoring Systems have been shown to be very effective in supporting learning in domains such as mathematics, physics,
computer programming, etc. However, they are yet to achieve similar success in tutoring metacognition. While an increasing
number of educational technology systems support productive metacognitive behavior within the sco...
The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED-2007) is being held July 9--13, 2007, in Los Angeles, California. AIED Conferences are organized by the International AIED Society on a biennial basis. The goal of the International ...
In our on-going endeavor to teach students better help-seeking skills we designed a three-pronged Help-Seeking Support Environment that includes (a) classroom instruction (b) a Self-Assessment Tutor, to help students evaluate their own need for help, and (c) an updated version of the Help Tutor, which provides feedback with respect to students' hel...
Students often use available help facilities in an unproductive fashion. To improve students' help-seeking behavior we built the Help Tutor - a domain-independent agent that can be added as an adjunct to Cognitive Tutors. Rather than making help-seeking decisions for the students, the Help Tutor teaches better help-seeking skills by tracing student...