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A metacognitive learning organizer to introduce learning strategies for PLE users and SRL students
Abstract
Personal Learning Environment is a concept that is in line with Self-Regulated Learning. Building and using a PLE is a challenging task that requires students to have developed their metacognitive skills. In Self-Regulated Learning and lifelong learning, typical PLE scenarios, there is no guidance or tutoring. There is a need of helping the students to develop these skills, to learn how to manage time and how to evaluate their learning process in order to improve it. We propose the creation of an organizer with support for the development of metacognitive skills to help users meeting their learning goals.
... In [12] we analyzed the requirements to give support to the metacognitive control processes discussed above, and introduced our proposal for a different learning organizer with metacognitive support to be integrated into any distributed PLE. There we made a general description of the system and explained the methodology to integrate KWL into the organizer. ...
... The resources are linked and evaluated by the learners, who act as content curators. Social features like project ratings, groups, etc. were explained in [12] and will not be discussed here. ...
Building and using a personal learning environment is challenging and requires the students to have their metacognitive skills developed. Many students need help to develop these skills, to learn how to manage and evaluate their learning process in order to improve it. We designed an organizer with metacognitive support to help users to meet their learning goals. Here, we propose: 1) embedding learning strategies to support metacognitive learning; 2) a learning strategies recommender; 3) our vision of a learning analytics module for learners to support learning awareness and the reflection process; and 4) our solution for recommendations based on tag relationships, tag enrichment, and folksonomies.
... Similar approaches are in use to stimulate reflection in online Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) (Vazquez, 2013) Online 'chatterbots', agents who text chat to others as if they were people, are now commonly used in online environments for a variety of purposes. Agents whose role is to stimulate thinking in online environments are being experimented with (Soller et al., 2005). ...
... It is a learning organizer with metacognitive support designed for self-regulated learners. The idea is to offer tools for planning, monitoring and evaluating their own learning using embedded learning and self-regulation strategies, with the intention of promoting the improvement of metacognitive skills and self-regulation, so learners are provided with support for common learning tasks [20]. It is based on modules, which have been explained with more detail in [19] and its monitoring system based on learning analytics in [21]. ...
In all the projects centered on the promotion of self-regulation, self-regulation strategies and learning strategies are taught, to enable the students to use them in order to improve their learning and self-regulatory skills. When the students use these strategies, they choose the tools that they want to use to implement the strategies, pen and paper in many cases, and generic software tools in other cases, as the range of specialized tools is very poor or they do not enable the implementation of the strategies more efficiently than the generic ones. The requirements of the support for self-regulated learning provided by a software tool are not clear. The goal of this paper is, on the one hand, to define the design criteria for tools intended to support self-regulated learning, based on the study of self-regulated learning theory and strategies, and on the other hand to discuss the evaluation of tools' capabilities for supporting self-regulated learning.
... In [10] we have presented the initial requirements of the MLO and the initial phase of the integration of KWL (know, want, learned) [11], a learning strategy that fosters reflection and learning awareness. This allows the users to define what they know about a subject (K) and what they want to learn (W), aided by a list of concepts retrieved from DBpedia or from similar projects from other users, if any (Fig. 1). ...
Self-regulated learning is an active field of research in pedagogy, and a key element in the current European higher education. One of the main problems found by educators in the programs centered in the promotion of self-regulation is that they need to monitor all their students constantly and thoroughly. If the number of students is large, which is typical in higher education, this becomes a problem. They need tools to address it and be able to monitor their learning progress. We are developing a tool for self-regulated learners, to provide them with support for their learning process using embedded learning strategies and tools to enable planning, monitoring, and evaluating their own learning process. In this paper, we present the monitoring system designed for this tool, which has been enhanced in order to enable in-depth monitoring for both educators and learners. This enables process and progress tracking and also eases self-monitoring and self-evaluation for learners.
... In [8] we have presented the initial requirements of the MLO and the initial phase of the integration of KWL (know, want, learned) [9], a learning strategy that fosters reflection and learning awareness. This allows the users to define what they know about a subject (K) and what they want to learn (W), aided by a list of concepts retrieved from DBpedia or from similar projects from other users, if any ( Fig. 1). ...
Self-regulated learning is an active field of research in pedagogy. Self-regulation techniques are being tested at several educational levels, including university degrees. One of the main problems found by the educators is that they need to monitor all their students constantly and thoroughly. This cannot be done properly if the number of students is not small, which happens specially at university levels. They need tools to address this problem and to be able to monitor their learning progress. We are developing a tool for self-regulated learners, to provide them support for their learning process using embedded learning strategies and tools to enable planning, monitoring and evaluation of their own learning process. Its functionalities have been extended in order to enable both the educators and the learners to monitor in depth their learning progress in order to improve their self-regulation skills. In this paper we present the monitoring system designed for this tool.
Metacognition is a complex cognitive function that is considered to be one of the most important goals of education. One of the most effective ways to enhance metacognition suggested in the literature is using graphic organisers. However, it is unclear how graphic organisers can facilitate metacognition and what the relationship between them is. The present study is a scoping review that fills this gap and maps the current literature regarding metacognition, graphic organisers and their relationship. Online databases were used to identify papers, from which 25 of them were selected. The results of the review show that there are three types of graphic organisers-metacognition relationship: (1) graphic organisers are used in interventions to enhance metacognition, (2) a combination of graphic organisers and metacognition activities is used in interventions to enhance learning outcomes, and (3) graphic organisers are used to evaluate metacognition. The review also highlights the need for further studies in the field that use experimental design and include younger learners, and diverse subjects, learning domains and contexts. The present study concludes by offering instructional insights for designing metacognition interventions by utilising graphic organisers as aids.
In this paper we attempt to address the issue of supporting self-regulation by Personal Learning Environments (PLE), which provide the learner with a freedom to design and compose his or her learning environment according to personal preferences and context demands. Psychology and neuroscience offer a lot of highly relevant results that should be taken into account. We report on our experiments mainly with PhD students, which represent a community of advanced learners. This needs to be considered when interpreting their feedback, as for most of the learners is self-regulation even more challenging. Even students at this high level appreciate pedagogical support in the learning process.
This paper proposes the usage of a learning activity based recommendation approach for fostering self-regulated learning in a personal learning environment. For this purpose two widgets are developed and evaluated, which allow learners to compile an individual learning plan from recommendations of learning activities that match a given task.
INES (INtelligent Educational System) is an operative prototype of an e-learning platform. This platform includes several tools and technologies, such as: (i) semantic management of users and contents; (ii) conversational agents to communicate with students in natural language; (iii) BDI-based (Believes, Desires, Intentions) agents, which shape the tutoring module of the system; (iv) an inference engine; and (v) ontologies, to semantically model the users, their activities, and the learning contents. The main contribution of this paper is the intelligent tutoring module of the system. Briefly, the tasks of this module are to recognize each student (checking his/her system credentials) and to obtain information about his/her learning progress. So, it can be able to suggest to each student specific tasks to achieve his/her particular learning objectives, based on several parameters related to the existing learning paths and the student’s profile.
Forty male and female l0th-grade students from a high achievement track and 40 from other (lower) achievement tracks of a suburban high school were interviewed concerning their use of self-regulated learning strategies during class, homework, and study. Fourteen categories of self-regulation strategies were identified from student answers that dealt with six learning contexts. High achieving students displayed significantly greater use of 13 categories of self-regulated learning. The students' membership in their respective achievement group was predicted with 93% accuracy using their reports of self-regulated learning. When compared to students' gender and socioeconomic status indices in regression analyses, self-regulated learning measures proved to be the best predictor of standardized achievement test scores. The results were discussed in terms of a social learning view of self-regulated learning.
The mashup era has emerged in response to the challenge of integrating existing services, data sources, and tools to generate new applications. Mashups are usually realized either through a seamless integration, in which only the resulting application is known by the end-users, or through integration of original applications, data sources, and tools, particularly in terms of widgets, into the same graphical space, in which participating applications and data sources are identifiable by the end-users. The former composes a unified functionality or data presentation/source from the original sources. The latter generates a digital environment in which participating sources exist as individual entities, but the true integration can only be realized through enabling widgets to be responsive to the events happening in each other. We call such an integration widget orchestration. In this paper, we provide a holistic view on the mashup era and a theoretical grounding for widget-based digital environments, we elaborate on key challenges for realizing such environments and (semi-)automatic widget orchestration, and we introduce our solution strategies. We identified following challenges: widget interoperability, user-behavior mining, and infrastructure. We introduce functional interfaces (FWI) for application interoperability, exploit semantic web technologies for data interoperability, and investigate the possibility of employing workflow/process mining techniques, along with Petri nets as a formal ground, for user-behavior mining. We outline a reference platform and architecture, compliant with our strategies, to foster re-usability of widgets and development of standardized widget-based environments. We have implemented a prototype for a Widget-based Personal Learning Environment (WIPLE) for foreign language learning in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution strategies, framework, and architecture.
PLE (Personal Learning Environment o entorno personal de aprendizaje) es uno de los conceptos que concita mayor interés y debate en los círculos de la tecnología educativa. Tecnología y pedagogía se retroalimentan mutuamente en el debate sobre los PLEs. El PLE es un producto de la confluencia de diversos factores, entre ellos la generalización del uso de las herramientas y servicios de la Web 2.0 en todos los niveles educativos y modalidades. Sin embargo, a juicio de los autores, no se trata de un sistema tecnológico llamado a sustituir o complementar los actualmente existentes, sino de un nuevo enfoque sobre cómo podemos utilizar las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación en el aprendizaje tanto en la formación inicial como a lo largo del ciclo vital. En el presente capítulo se intenta definir el concepto, se exploran algunas de sus implicaciones didácticas y se ofrecen algunas ideas sobre cómo se está utilizando en diversos contextos. Nowadays, PLE (Personal Learning Environments) is one of the most interesting concepts in the educational technology debate. In the discussion about PLE, technology and pedagogy are confronted, but at the same time –as usual–¬ are mutually dependent. The PLE is a product of the confluence of several factors, including the widespread Web 2.0 tools and services at almost all educational levels and modalities. Nevertheless, according the authors opinion, PLE is not a technological system intended to replace or complementing the existing ones. It is a new approach about how can we use information and communication technologies in order to enhance both, initial and lifelong learning. The present chapter attempts to define and clarify the concept, explore some didactic implications of it, as well as propose some ideas about the impact of it in diverse learning contexts.
The design of a personal, mobile Knowledge and Learning Organisation System (KLeOS) is described. Studies of adult learning practice showed that learning activity is mobile between locations, time slots, and topic areas. Moreover, learning follows a hierarchical organisation at three operational levels: learning activities are discrete acts, which are grouped to form learning episodes, which in turn are grouped to form learning projects. KLeOS reflects this hierarchical structure and allows the user to organise and manage their learning experiences and resources as a visual timeline. In addition, it incorporates a knowledge map, which is updated as the user progresses through learning experiences. The interface of the organiser is based on the idea of timelines and employs project lines and activity lines to represent the user's learning over a lifetime. The organiser forms a bridge between the timeline and the knowledge map by tagging the nodes of knowledge with the context of the learning episode(s) within which that knowledge was acquired. The architecture of KLeOS allows it to be used on a number of different platforms, thus ensuring mobility.
The goal of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) would be to engage the students in sustained reasoning activity and to interact with the student based on a deep understanding of the students' behavior. This chapter begins by providing an overview of intelligent tutoring systems. The chapter comments on competing research goals in the field, followed by descriptions of two successful systems: (1) the Pittsburgh urban math project algebra tutor project and (2) the SHERLOCK project. These two systems are being deployed in real-world educational environments with substantial success. This chapter briefly describes the underlying theory and implementation of each system, to motivate later discussions. A description of the standard components in an intelligent tutoring system is also presented along with a discussion of human-computer interaction assessment issues unique to educational software. This chapter also provides a prescription for ITS design and development methods. Several issues concerning ITS design principles are also addressed in the chapter.
PLEs in their broader sense (the ad-hoc, serendipitous and potentially chaotic set of tools that learners bring to their learning) are increasingly important for learners in the context of formal study. In this paper we outline the approach that we are taking at the University of Southampton in redesigning our teaching and learning infrastructure into an Institutional PLE. We do not see this term as an oxymoron. We define an Institutional PLE as an environment that provides a personalised interface to University data and services and at the same time exposes that data and services to a student's personal tools. Our goal is to provide a digital platform that can cope with an evolving learning and teaching environment, as well as support the social and community aspects of the institution.
Personal Learning Environment is a reference to future learning. In this paper we present a multi-level analysis of the options and requirements in the universe of PLE, analyzing the content management system as the main tool of the learning environment. There are two principal models: distributed applications and mashups. Both have advantages and disadvantages, and they also share a big issue: lack of inter-application communication. We are trying to find a solution to this problem presenting an architecture for distributed applications model, so that transparency to the uses will be maintained.
This article describes the results of a study in which college developmental reading students were taught how to use study techniques which involved self‐questioning. Over a nine‐week period, subjects were trained in the application of SQ3R (Robinson, 1961), REAP (Eanet & Manzo, 1976), and self‐questioning (Andre & Anderson, 1978‐79) to content area prose materials. Quantitative results indicated that the SQ3R group significantly outperformed the REAP group on a posttest measure of comprehension. No other significant differences were found. In addition, a qualitative analysis was conducted to determine how well subjects processed information during the application of their specific study techniques. These findings indicated that: (1) structured study techniques may be more effective for aiding students' retention of content area prose materials; (2) students are more concerned with detail or factual information than “higher level” forms of information; and (3) instructors of college developmental reading students need to instruct their students as to how to generate questions at all levels of comprehension.
Metacognition refers to understanding and controlling cognition. This article describes different kinds of metacognitive knowledge and how this knowledge relates to other cognitive skills such as strategy use and domain knowledge, as well as ability. The relative strengths and weaknesses of three instructional strategies for promoting metacognition among gifted and talented students are reviewed. Discussion also focuses on what kind of skills and strategies should be included in metacognitive instruction programs.
"The first volume to appear on this topic and now a classic in the field, "Intelligent Tutoring Systems" provides the reader with descriptions of the major systems implemented before 1981. The introduction seeks to emphasise the principal contributions made in the field, to outline continuing research issues, and to relate these to research activities in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Subject areas discussed are as varied as arithmetic, algebra, electronics, and medicine, together with some informal gaming environments"
Equipping students with lifelong learning skills should be an important aim of higher education as demands in the work place are rapidly changing. Reports by the Australian government indicate that adaptability and flexibility will be new skills sought after by employers. Therefore, graduates not only need to learn, but needed to learn how to learn efficiently and effectively so that they can adapt quickly. The authors suggest a combination of metacognition and the appropriate use of information technology in units adopting a studio learning model may be one solution for addressing this issue. The study examined the current use of metacognitive strategies in a studio based multimedia unit at Monash University and how these strategies could be adopted to increase learning effectiveness. The unit provides a flexible learning curriculum with students working in teams in conjunction with real clients on a range of projects which span the entire gamut of multimedia work. Every student's learning experience is unique due to the project they are involved with and the role they play in their team. The study investigates the metacognitive aspects of learning in the unit from the perspective of staff and students. This paper suggests how information technology can support the metacognitive aspects of learning. It will also outline results from a study conducted in 2005-06, which indicated that staff and students were not sufficiently aware of the benefits of metacognitive learning. It concludes by suggesting staff and students should be informed of the benefits of metacognitive learning and that adequate practices must be employed so that metacognitive skills can be developed
Easy acquisition of information from the internet has made many college students become idle while working on their online inquiry learning assignments. As the insufficiency of metacognitive skills is one important factor that causes thinking idle during online inquiry, the application of Diigo social media is integrated with metacognitive scaffolds to help improve metacognitive skills. The quasi-experimental design was used in this research and the findings provided evidence that the experimental group performed significantly greater gains compared with control group. Discussion and suggestions are provided in this paper.
Self-regulated learning has emerged as an important new construct in education. Our understanding of self-regulated learning has been informed by three schools of thought: (1) research on learning styles, (2) research on metacognition and regulation styles, and (3) theories of the self, including goal-directed behavior. Based on these schools of thought, a three-layer model is presented. The innermost layer pertains to regulation of the processing modes. The middle layer represents regulation of the learning process. The outermost layer concerns regulation of the self. Educators and researchers would benefit from an integration of these three frames of reference into a comprehensive model of self-regulated learning.
A general framework is presented to help understand the relationship between motivation and self-regulated learning. According to the framework, self-regulated learning can be facilitated by the adoption of mastery and relative ability goals and hindered by the adoption of extrinsic goals. In addition, positive self-efficacy and task value beliefs can promote self-regulated behavior. Self-regulated learning is defined as the strategies that students use to regulate their cognition (i.e., use of various cognitive and metacognitive strategies) as well as the use of resource management strategies that students use to control their learning.
This article focuses on personal learning environments (PLEs). The idea with PLEs is to put students in a more central position in the learning process by allowing them to design their own learning environments and by emphasising the self-regulated nature of the learning. This study describes the structure, functions and challenges of PLEs made by 33 students from vocational and polytechnic level schools in Eastern Finland after the first year of using them. Document and artefact analysis revealed that students built their PLEs for: mirroring the conventional learning environment; as an environment for reflection; as an environment to showcase skills; and as an environment for collaboration and networking. Student reflections indicate that building and using a PLE is a challenging task which requires specific teacher and pedagogical support. Designing a PLE demands both ICT skills and an awareness of one’s own learning methods.
Despite the national surge in interest in technology fields, student performance measures continue to reveal that many students lack the analytical skills to complete college level courses in math and computer science. The development of tools for the measurement and enhancement of metacognitive skills will be examined. The primary measuring tool, the metacognitive skills inventory, was designed to measure metacognitive abilities. The inventory consists of two subscales: decomposition and confidence. The decomposition subscale measures the subjects ' awareness and reported use of the critical problem solving steps. Examples are problem identification, planning of solution strategies, and comparison of these strategies. The confidence subscale, measures the extent to which subjects are confident in their own problem solving ability. The inventory has been used in studies comparing student grades in college courses, problem solving skills at different levels in various college programs, and student performance on various tests. These tests include the SAT (both verbal and math), the MARS-R math anxiety scales, and the general expectancy of success scale-revised. The MSI is currently being used as an integral component of current research dealing with the development of training and education programs to increase metacognitive skills.
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