Stephanie Siler

• Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology
• Medical Professional at Carnegie Mellon University

One obstacle to understanding abstract concepts such as the “control of variables” strategy (CVS) is the tendency for learners to focus on surface rather than deep features in instructional materials. However, in tasks such as learning CVS, these same surface features may also support understanding, provided learners realize the underlying task goa...

The authors investigated whether some advantages of tutoring over other instructional methods are due to microadaptation, or, tutors basing their actions on assessments of tutees they develop during tutoring. In a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment, independent variables were shared experience (tutors either worked with the same or a different tutee...

This symposium raises the issue of the role of domain-general factors in scientific reasoning and argumentation tasks. The contributions cover conceptual problems concerning the interplay of general and specific elements in scientific reasoning, methodological requirements and existing research paradigms for investigating the role of cross-domain f...

Many studies have shown benefits associated with engaging students in problem-solving activities prior to administering lessons. These problem-solving activities are assumed to activate relevant knowledge and allow students to develop some initial knowledge structures, which support understanding of the lesson. In this paper we report the results o...

A vital goal of instruction is to enable learners to transfer acquired knowledge to appropriate future situations. For elementary school children in middle-high-SES schools, “explicit” instruction on the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS) has proven to be very effective at promoting transfer, even after time delays, when administered by human inst...

In this study, we compared our computer tutor (“TED” for Training in Experimental Design) to a teacher-guided control lesson also targeting experimental design but incorporating hands-on learning. Students in both groups showed significant gains in ability to design unconfounded experiments. TED instruction was significantly more efficient than the...

Face-to-face (FTF) human-human,tutoring has ranked among,the most effective forms of instruction. However, because computer-mediated (CM) tutoring is becoming increasingly common, it is instructive to evaluate its effectiveness relative to face-to-face tutoring. Does the lack of spoken, face-to-face interaction affect learning gains and motivation?...

The spread of computer based instructional materials makes it important to determine the relative merits and effects of virtual materials vs. physical materials in early science instruction. In this paper we first lay out a framework for comparing key aspects of this virtual-physical issue, and then we describe three studies addressing it. In two s...

Amongst all instructional issues facing science education, the one that exerts the most substantial impact on the lasting achievement gap is the “mile-wide, inch-deep” curriculum, which is created by superficial alignments among standards, tests, and instructional materials.

Students learn more and gain greater understanding from one-to-one tutoring. The preferred explanation has been that the tutors' pedagogical skills are responsible for the learning gains. Pedagogical skills involve skillful execution of tactics, such as giving explanations and feedback, or selecting the appropriate problems or questions to ask the...

Developers of intelligent tutoring systems would like to know what human tutors do and which activities are responsible for their success in tutoring. We address these questions by comparing episodes where tutoring does and does not cause learning. Approximately 125 hr of tutorial dialog between expert human tutors and physics students are analyzed...

In this study we compared the accuracy of tutors' assessments of their students' general competence, conceptual knowledge and affective state in two different tutoring contexts: face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated (CM). We found that the accuracy of tutors' assessments of their students was dependent on both the type of student information tha...

It is undoubtedly true that one prominent component of effective human tutoring is collaborative dialogue between student and tutor (7, 12). Nevertheless, many impor- tant questions remain to be answered about which features of human tutorial dialogue make it effective and how the most effective human tutoring strategies can be imple- mented in a t...

In this paper we explore student initiative in human tutoring dialogues and how it potentially in∞u- ences tutor questioning strategies. We describe our annotation scheme for tutor questions and student responses in which student initiative is simply deflned as any unsolicited response from the student. We examine what is categorized as student ini...

In this paper we explore the problem of selecting appropriate Knowledge Construction Dialogues (KCDs) for the purpose of encouraging students to include important points in their qualitative physics explanations that are missing. We describe a hybrid symbolic/statistical approach developed in the context of the WHY2 conceptual physics tutor (VanLeh...

The Why2-Atlas system teaches qualitative physics by having students write paragraph-long explanations of simple mechanical phenomena. The tutor uses deep syntactic analysis and abductive theorem proving to convert the student's essay to a proof. The proof formalizes not only what was said, but the likely beliefs behind what was said. This allows t...

In this paper we explore student initiative in human tutoring dialogues and how it potentially influ- ences tutor questioning strategies. We describe our annotation scheme for tutor questions and student responses in which student initiative is simply defined as any unsolicited response from the student. We examine what is categorized as student in...

Human one-to-one tutoring has been shown to be a very effective form of instruction. Three contrasting hypotheses, a tutor-centered one, a student-centered one, and an interactive one could all potentially explain the effectiveness of tutoring. To test these hypotheses, analyses focused not only on the effectiveness of the tutors’ moves, but also o...

The goal of the Atlas project is to increase the opportunities for students to construct their own knowledge by conversing (in typed form) with a natural language-based ITS. Our previous research (Freedman et al., 2000; Freedman, 2000; Ros'e, 2000) has produced reusable components and tools for facilitating the development of domain specific tutori...

Human one-to-one tutoring has been shown to be a very effective form of instruction. Three contrasting hypotheses, a tutor-centered one, a student-centered one, and an interactive one could all potentially explain the effectiveness of tutoring. To test these hypotheses, analyses focused not only on the effectiveness of the tutors' moves, but also o...

. Although conventional tests are often used for determining a student's overall competence, they are seldom used for determining a finegrained model. However, this problem does arise occasionally, such as when a conventional test is used to initialize the student model of an ITS. Existing psychometric techniques for solving this problem are intrac...

Although conventional tests are often used for determining a student's overall competence, they are seldom used for determining a fine- grained model. However, this problem does arise occasionally, such as when a conventional test is used to initialize the student model of an ITS. Existing psychometric techniques for solving this problem are intrac...

The goal of the Atlas project has been to provide opportunities for students to construct their own knowledge and to learn actively by conversing with a natural language-based ITS. We report the results of an evaluation comparing student learn- ing of basic qualitative physics concepts when they engage in natural language dialog, specically in Know...

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