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Creating Bridges: The Role of Exploratory Design Research in an Intelligent Tutoring System Project
Abstract
Designers of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have long been interested in delivering personalized teaching to individual students, typically by ensuring that the student receives content appropriate to their skills and knowledge. Nonetheless, a more holistic view on what constitutes good teaching practice has challenged whether this approach to user modelling is sufficient. Teaching is not only defined by what is taught, but also by how it is taught. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploratory design research can support this view by generating a more inclusive set of user attributes for purposes of user modelling. Through a case study, we show that design research for user modelling can function as a boundary object serving three important roles that underpin more specifically the design of user modelling and more broadly ITS design. First, design research can establish common ground by encapsulating domain knowledge in an accessible form. This can support diverse project stakeholders to make decisions on what is to be modelled. Secondly, design research can reveal a wide range of teaching and learning perspectives that in turn introduce transparency to the decision-making process of user modelling and provoke a sense of criticality and accountability amongst project stakeholders. Thirdly, design research can build new bridges between the design of the technology and the user model that underpins it. To this end, user attributes deemed important, yet too complex or cumbersome to develop, can become design principles in the context of the overall ITS design.
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS
• We highlight how the creation of user models rarely incorporates assistance from the HCI community.
• We present a series of design activities intended to assist in the creation of a User Model.
• We examine how this design-oriented methodology creates a boundary object.
• We discuss the three benefits this boundary object brings to constructing user models, namely establishing common ground, creating transparency when considering possible alternatives and creating a springboard for new activities.
... Considering the advantages of an intelligent tutoring system; various literature reviewed agreed that the tutoring system edged out human experts provided the rules that they are built into them are error-free (Adams et al., 2014;Gonzalez et al., 2014). They tend to execute the rule to a high accuracy rate (Woolf, 2009;Gooch et al., 2015) and that it simulates better (Blooms, 1984) Also, tutoring system used in a case scenario based environment provides the student with repeated use of the concept since they are reproducible. Similarly, it makes them readily available for consultation by students at every stage and for the student to be able to interrogate and analyse the reasoning process (Merrill et . ...
... Interestingly, most each of the reviewed tutoring system tends to align with three main learning theories widely used in teaching environments, namely: behaviourism, cognitive science, and constructivism (Ertmer & Newby, 1993;Woolf, 2009). Also, some tutoring applications have adopted what could be tagged as an amalgamation of learning theories within a framework which is a bit of a challenge to implement without a technology-mediated application (Anderson et al., 1995;Laurrilard, 2009;Woolf, 2009;Gooch et al., 2015). ...
... It has also been argued that this kind of framework is capable of challenging and enhancing the frontiers of human learning by using methods based on one-to-one, inquiry, peer learning, and collaboration (Wenger, 1987;Woolf, 2009;Gooch, et al., 2015). Further, the combination of these methods are seen as central to developing critical thinking, problem-solving, and reasoning (Kuhn, 1970;Goldman, 1992) despite the expenses associated with teacher time, resources, and labour, and might require hiring more human tutors (Holmboe et al., 2010). ...
This study examines the views and experiences of the teaching staffs on the post-graduate course in dyslexia assessment teacher training. It attempts to investigate the contributions of the recently introduced software application ‘AssessRite’ in meeting curriculum goals. An exploratory qualitative study was carried out making use of semi-structured interviews with five teaching staff on the Special
Learning Difficulties (SPLD) programme to determine the impact of the utilisation of this tool as a teaching aid in meeting curriculum goals. Findings indicate that the integration of the tutoring application has contributed to a great extent in meeting the curriculum goals of the programme and the success rate increased from 55% to 88% in the short term usage of 12 months. However, the tool has
only been integrated into the delivery for just one year, and the sample group is small, so there is the need to be cautious about the contribution so far.
... Learners might require some form of help or assistance to get over a hurdle, to enable themselves to move forward in their learning, to reflect on progress, or in a more general sense to reach their educational goals. 8 The idea of inclusive education is pertinent here as it involves focusing on the individual needs of learners, "helping them to overcome any barriers that may prevent them from reaching their potential". 9,10 Assistance may be given to learners by adjusting the learning environment or through various uses of technologies. ...
... (1-10) 13 Rate the attainment of the learning outcomes. (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10) It was observed that students became familiar easily and very quickly with the educational software, its features and its functionalities. Their interest was undiminished during the whole period of their interaction with the educational application. ...
Mobile learning offers, with the help of handheld devices, a continuous access to the learning process. With the advent of mobile learning, educational systems are changing, offering the possibility of distance education without the restrictions of place and time. As such, new technological advancements are employed by mobile learning. This paper presents the design, development and evaluation of a novel artificial conversational entity, incorporated in a mobile learning system for personalized English language instruction. More specifically, it offers amelioration of the domain knowledge model by adapting it to the students’ needs and to the pace that they prefer to receive learning. Moreover, it creates personalized tutoring advice in order to support students in the educational process. Finally, it can assist the procedure of assessments since it automatically generates questions to assess the knowledge level of students. The evaluation of the mobile tutoring system presents promising results regarding the incorporation of this new technology in digital education with the aim of creating a student-centric learning experience.
... Users can understand the reasoning process and have more faith in the expert system because the explanation process is transparent [13]. e fundamental requirements for the digital music classroom teaching assistant system are presented by Gooch et al., followed by a division of the system into three modules and a detailed explanation of the functions of each module [14]. In order to increase the precision of the indicators used to measure teaching quality, Boulay proposed a mathematical model of teaching quality evaluation based on wavelet NN (neural network). ...
The Internet has now ingrained itself into every aspect of people’s lives and has grown to be a necessity. Machine learning technology is applied to the design of music teaching and teaching assistant systems with the aim of bringing convenience to students and teachers in teaching and learning and improving teaching efficiency and quality through the design and implementation of a friendly and interactive intelligent music assistant teaching system. The B/S mode framework aids in the realisation of the hierarchy and module structure of the system design during the system implementation process. Last but not least, this paper looks at the system modules, confirms all of the system’s operations, and makes sure each functional module is working properly. The algorithm is straightforward, effective, simple to use, and user-friendly, and the system is expandable, portable, and transparent. It is an excellent teaching tool for music.
Against the background of “Internet plus,” western countries have taken a lead in modernizing educational management technology to fit the times. The application of education management technology in China is in a period of rapid development. There are certain differences between China and western countries. In order to adapt to the intelligent trend of contemporary education management reform and improve the national macro education management level, there should be cross-cultural thinking on the differences in the development of educational management technology capabilities between China and the West. Based on the literature analysis of Chinese and Western education management technology and education management theory, and based on the research data of 8 domestic colleges and universities education management technology, we explored the development differences between China and the West in teaching evaluation, multimedia teaching, and teaching decision-making. The results showed that ideology, national conditions and technology are the main influencing factor of the differences in the development of educational management technology capabilities between China and the West. We need to create a cross-cultural education concept conflict, cross-cultural perspective to re-plan the teacher’s positioning, and fundamentally change the concept of teachers to accept Western education management models in China. The application proportion of education management technology should be allocated based on the actual teaching situation, to increase the teaching utilization rate of multimedia equipment, and reduce unnecessary multimedia teaching. Data-driven intelligent teaching decision-making technology should be developed to guide teaching behavior scientifically and efficiently. Finally, we should construct a modern management system in line with national conditions, as well as narrow the gap between Chinese and western educational management.
Taking a process-orientated, social constructivist lens, we examine the case of a digital game called Words Matter. The game was designed for children with dyslexia and was informed by principles from casual games and evidence-based practice from special education. Focusing on the game play of two groups of children, we employ a systematic thematic analytic approach on videos of children’s verbal and non-verbal interaction triangulated with their game logs, concentrating on the nature of student-student as well as student-tutor social interactions. Our findings show that children spontaneously engage in ‘game talk’ regarding game performance, content, actions and experiences. While this game talk facilitates a strong sense of social engagement and playfulness, it also caters to a variety of new opportunities for learning by sparking tutor and student-initiated interventions. Alongside its social theoretical lens on digital games-based learning, the paper analyses game-based social interactions in tandem with game design decisions enabling additional implications to be drawn for pedagogical practice and game design.
User profiling and e-learning have received great attention in the last years. In a learning environment, user profiling provides historical data of the students' performance on different learning subjects. e-Learning tools such as serious games can collect user's data and build a user profile by appropriate storing these information. Thus, by combining above techniques and analysing each user's data a teacher can provide personalized treatment to her/his students. In this paper we present our solution on storing and analysing user data on a centralized server. Our system stores data collected from users with dyslexia. We maintain one user profile per student from data taken from a) user responses on a screening test and b) from user's performance on a set of serious games. The learning process then depends on the above data, so it is important to store and analyse our resources efficiently while respecting the user's privacy. Our solution is based on the usage of the cube model in parallel with a traditional, table-based storage of log data. The services we present are part of the iLearnRW1 project, aiming to support gamified learning for children with dyslexia.
This paper proposes a design of a learning management system based on three essential concepts of an intelligent tutoring system: knowledge domain, learning styles and navigation, and feedback. According to success of teaching by using a pair of a pre-quiz and a quiz, implemented by Moodle learning system in the previous research of the author, the teaching with a Pair of a Pre-quiz and a Quiz (PPQ) has been designed in order to improve the past learning system and take a step towards developing a practical intelligent tutoring system suitable for teaching Java.
The concept of gamification is receiving increasing attention, particularly for its potential to motivate students. However, to date the majority of studies in the context of education have predominantly focused on University students. This paper explores how gamification could potentially benefit a specific student population, children with dyslexia who are transitioning from primary to secondary school. Two teachers from specialist dyslexia teaching centres used classDojo, a gamification platform, during their teaching sessions for one term. We detail how the teachers appropriated the platform in different ways and how the students discussed classDojo in terms of motivation. These findings have subsequently informed a set of provisional implications for gamification distilling opportunities for future pedagogical uses, gamification design for special education and methodological approaches to how gamification is studied.
The concept of gamification is receiving increasing amounts of attention. However, to date there has been little reported work that has moved beyond anecdotal accounts of its use within educational situations and studies that have been undertaken in this area have predominantly focused on University students. This paper explores how gamification could potentially benefit a specific student population, children with dyslexia who are transitioning from primary to secondary school. Two teachers from specialist dyslexia teaching centres used classDojo, a gamification platform, during their teaching sessions for one term. We detail how the teachers appropriated the platform in different ways and how this impacted the resulting forms of motivation engendered within the students. These findings have subsequently informed a series of design recommendations presented within the paper regarding how gamification platforms can be optimised for students with dyslexia. We conclude by arguing that our work can serve as a springboard for discussing how gamification platforms could be of use for students with other special educational needs.
Distributed cognition (DCog) extends the traditional notion of cognition using a similar theoretical framework and ontological basis for describing human activity. The most developed framework of distributed cognition uses the same computational basis to understand human behavior as cognitive psychology and applies the same notions of information representations and representational transformations. Analysis of systems using distributed cognition permits the inclusion of all of the significant features in the environment that contribute toward the accomplishment of tasks. The DCog framework allows researchers to consider all of the factors relevant to the task, bringing together the people, the problem, and the tools used into a single unit of analysis. It is therefore an ideal method to use to discover the artifactual, social, and cultural dimensions of work.
Serious games have received much positive attention; correspondingly, many researchers have taken up the challenge of establishing how to best design them. However, the current literature often focuses on best practice design strategies and frameworks. Fine-grained details, contextual descriptions, and organisational factors that are invaluable in helping us to learn from and reflect on project experiences are often overlooked. In this paper, we present five distinct and sometimes competing perspectives that are critical in understanding factors that influence serious game projects: project organisation, technology, domain knowledge, user research, and game design. We explain these perspectives by providing insights from the design and development process of an EU-funded serious game about conflict resolution developed by an interdisciplinary consortium of researchers and industry-based developers. We also point out a set of underlying forces that become evident from viewing the process from different perspectives, to underscore that problems exist in serious game projects and that we should open the conversation about them.
The term 'participation' is traditionally used in HCI to describe the involvement of users and stakeholders in design processes, with a pretext of distributing control to participants to shape their technological future. In this paper we ask whether these values can hold up in practice, particularly as participation takes on new meanings and incorporates new perspectives. We argue that much HCI research leans towards configuring participation. In exploring this claim we explore three questions that we consider important for understanding how HCI configures participation; Who initiates, directs and benefits from user participation in design? In what forms does user participation occur? How is control shared with users in design? In answering these questions we consider the conceptual, ethical and pragmatic problems this raises for current participatory HCI research. Finally, we offer directions for future work explicitly dealing with the configuration of participation.
The neurodiversity movement seeks to positively reframe certain neurological conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and dyslexia, by concentrating on their characteristic strengths. In recent years, neurodiverse children have increasingly been involved in the technology design process, but the design approaches adopted have focused mostly on overcoming difficulties of working with these children, leaving their strengths untapped. In this paper, we present a new participatory design (PD) framework, Diversity for Design (D4D), that provides guidance for technology designers working with neurodiverse children in establishing PD methods that capitalize on children’s strengths and also support potential difficulties. We present two case studies of use of our D4D framework, involving children with ASD and dyslexia, showing how it informed the development and refinement of PD methods tailored to these populations. In addition, we show how the D4D framework can be applied to other neurodiverse populations.
Many technology design projects are “wicked problems”. In this case study we employ the concept of wicked problems in order to examine the responsible and ethical implications of undertaking ICT research projects within teams involving partners from a range of different backgrounds and geographic locations. Through our experiences working as user-centred designers on the EU funded ICT STREP project ILearnRW, which aims to develop learning software for children with dyslexia, we consider the consequences of specific team dynamics on ethical and responsible practice. Through examining each of the characteristics of wicked problems we highlight a number of challenges for undertaking responsible and ethical research within the context of a multidisciplinary and geographically diverse team. We propose that user-centred designers are best positioned to mitigate these challenges since their research philosophy is compatible with ethics and responsibility. We suggest several strategies that user-centred designers can employ in their teamwork in order to tackle these issues.
Games offer a compelling medium for learning. However, designing a successful learning game that features engagement alongside its educational objectives is a craft that is still underway. Our research adapts a user-centered approach toward designing a game that will teach children conflict resolution skills. By involving users of the game, namely teachers and students, in the design process we reveal new considerations for how to create convincing narratives of conflict, sustain children's engagement and gain teachers' support. At the same time, our work highlights the challenges facing researchers in this domain who must balance users' values, needs and expectations with the game's learning objectives.
Abstract Only critical distancing let Godard value the premonitory potential of film, and at the same time, point out the incapacity to register the realness that it generated. The filmmaker has always believed that “film is prophetic, it predicts and announces things”, and that this condition corresponds to its essence as a record. Rancière in a lucid reading of Film History says that for Godard: “film is responsible for not filming fields in their time; great for filming them before their time and guilty for not knowing how to recognize them”. This article begins with these clear political propositions, as well as proposing some variations.
In this essay, I explore several facets of research through design in order to contribute to discussions about how the approach should develop. The essay has three parts. In the first, I review two influential theories from the Philosophy of Science to help reflect on the nature of design theory, concluding that research through design is likely to produce theories that are provisional, contingent, and aspirational. In the second part, I discuss three possible interpretations for the diversity of approaches to research through design, and suggest that this variation need not be seen as a sign of inadequate standards or a lack of cumulative progress in the field, but may be natural for a generative endeavour. In the final section, I suggest that, rather than aiming to develop increasingly comprehensive theories of design, practice based research might better view theory as annotation of realised design examples, and particularly portfolios of related pieces. Overall, I suggest that the design research community should be wary of impulses towards convergence and standardisation, and instead take pride in its aptitude for exploring and speculating, particularising and diversifying, and - especially - its ability to manifest the results in the form of new, conceptually rich artefacts.
Adaptive hypermedia is a new area of research at the crossroads of hypermedia, adaptive systems, and intelligent tutoring systems. Educational hypermedia systems is cirrently the most popular kind of adaptive hypermedia. The goal of this paper is to uncover the secrets of authoring adaptive educational hypermedia. The paper provides a clear structured view on the process of adaptive hypermedia authoring starting from the early design stage. It also reviews a few modern adaptive hypermedia authoring systems that are oriented to educational practitioners.
Thematic analysis is a poorly demarcated, rarely acknowledged, yet widely used qualitative analytic method within psychology. In this paper, we argue that it offers an accessible and theoretically flexible approach to analysing qualitative data. We outline what thematic analysis is, locating it in relation to other qualitative analytic methods that search for themes or patterns, and in relation to different epistemological and ontological positions. We then provide clear guidelines to those wanting to start thematic analysis, or conduct it in a more deliberate and rigorous way, and consider potential pitfalls in conducting thematic analysis. Finally, we outline the disadvantages and advantages of thematic analysis. We conclude by advocating thematic analysis as a useful and flexible method for qualitative research in and beyond psychology.
Interaction design research is a unique discipline embracing practicing professionals, design educators and academic researchers, but attracting attention from people with different backgrounds and interests has lead to the question of what constitutes ‘good research’. What is rigorous and relevant interaction design research and how do we recognise and evaluate it? Most current attempts at dealing with these issues tend to be on loan from other disciplines, and may overlook, conceal, or knowingly exclude some of what makes interaction design research such a unique field. Our primary contribution is that what may be perceived as three different design research activities—design practice, design exploration and design studies—have their own purposes, intended outcomes, and internal logic. Each approach must be examined in its own right and the notions of rigour and relevance have to be based on a firm understanding of the particular purpose of each approach.
This study presents new approaches for the detection and treatment of the attention of a student by an e-learning system through the use of the information given by the implicit interaction of the student with the system and the data com-ing from non-invasive devices such as webcams. Furthermore, the paper proposes two models for the treatment of the attention of students to be applied to an existing e-learning environment, in order to provide personalized content to the students and thus improving their learning experience.
Learner-centred design (LCD) is a nebulous concept. It can range from attempts to design with the needs of the learner at the forefront, to involving the learner at various stages of the design process, sometimes throughout the whole process. In addition, learner-centred design involving children implies additional issues which do not present themselves when using an LCD approach with adults. In this paper, we argue that current LCD frameworks do not consider the full range of issues necessary for successful design. We propose CARSS (Context, Activities, Roles, Stakeholders, Skills), a learner-centred design framework specifically for child learners, and describe two design case studies which demonstrate the framework in use.
this paper defines a framework for understanding the various roles children can have in the design process, and how these roles can impact technologies that are created. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems---human factors; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces---evaluation/methodology; interaction styles General Terms: Human Factors, Design, Theory Additional Key Words and Phrases: Children, design techniques, participatory design, evaluation, educational applications 1 CHILDREN AND TECHNOLOGY Computers for kids need to be fun like a friend, but can make me smart for school. They should also be friendly like my cat. The real thing is that they shouldn't make me have to type since I don't like that. I can talk much better! (Researcher Notes, April 3, 1999, Quote from an 8 year-old child). Children have their own likes, dislikes, curiosities, and nee
In this paper, we present a new approach to interaction modelling based on the concept of information resource. The approach is inspired by recent distributed cognition (DC) literature but develops a model that applies specifically to human-computer interaction (HCI) modelling. There are of course many approaches to modelling HCI and the motivation of this paper is not to offer yet another approach. Rather our motivation is that the recent developments in DC are so obviously relevant to HCI modelling and design yet the ideas have lacked visibility in the HCI community. By providing a model whose concepts are rooted in DC concepts we hope to achieve this visibility. In addition, we hope to provide the foundation for a programme of research that extends the DC analysis of single user systems presented here to larger units of analysis more familiar to CSCW and DC research. DC research identifies resources for action as central to the interaction between people and technologies, but it sto...
Objets fronti_re = s'adaptent pour prendre en compte plusieurs points de vue et maintenir une identité entre eux Cet espace de travail se construit grâce à des objets-frontières tels que des systèmes de classification, qui relient entre eux les concepts communs et les rôles sociaux divergents de chaque groupe professionnel. Les objet-frontière contribuent à la stabilité du système de référence en offrant un contexte partagé pour la communication et la coopération. Les objets peuvent être considérés comme frontière (Star et Griesemer, 1989) en tant qu’ils contribuent à la stabilité du système de référence en offrant un contexte partagé pour la communication et la coopération.
Every day, teachers design and test new ways of teaching, using learning technology to help their students. Sadly, their discoveries often remain local. By representing and communicating their best ideas as structured pedagogical patterns, teachers could develop this vital professional knowledge collectively
Models, modeling, and Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) are the basis for a set of development approaches known as model-driven development (MDD). Models are used to reason about a problem domain and design a solution in the solution domain. Relationships between these models provide a web of dependencies that record the process by which a solution is created, and help to understand the implications of changes at any point in that process. In addition to creating these models, we can define rules for automating many of the steps needed to convert one model representation to another, for tracing between model elements, and for analyzing important characteristics of the models. This style of MDD is called Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). The MDA approach is being widely discussed in the software industry today as a way of increasing the quality, efficiency, and predictability of large-scale software development. In this paper we explore the role of modeling and the MDA style of MDD, and provide a useful context for understanding current product and research efforts in area of MDA.
Research on the relationship between affect and cognition in Artificial Intelligence in Education AIEd brings an important dimension to our understanding of how learning occurs and how it can be facilitated. Emotions are crucial to learning, but their nature, the conditions under which they occur, and their exact impact on learning for different learners in diverse contexts still needs to be mapped out. The study of affect during learning can be challenging, because emotions are subjective, fleeting phenomena that are often difficult for learners to report accurately and for observers to perceive reliably. Context forms an integral part of learners' affect and the study thereof. This review provides a synthesis of the current knowledge elicitation methods that are used to aid the study of learners' affect and to inform the design of intelligent technologies for learning. Advantages and disadvantages of the specific methods are discussed along with their respective potential for enhancing research in this area, and issues related to the interpretation of data that emerges as the result of their use. References to related research are also provided together with illustrative examples of where the individual methods have been used in the past. Therefore, this review is intended as a resource for methodological decision making for those who want to study emotions and their antecedents in AIEd contexts, i.e. where the aim is to inform the design and implementation of an intelligent learning environment or to evaluate its use and educational efficacy.
Scientific work is heterogeneous, requiring many different actors and viewpoints. It also requires cooperation. The two create tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings. We present a model of how one group of actors managed this tension. It draws on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others connected to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, during its early years. Extending the Latour-Callon model of interessement, two major activities are central for translating between viewpoints: standardization of methods, and the development of `boundary objects'. Boundary objects are both adaptable to different viewpoints and robust enough to maintain identity across them. We distinguish four types of boundary objects: repositories, ideal types, coincident boundaries and standardized forms.
A meta-analysis of findings from 65 independent evaluations of school tutoring programs showed that these programs have positive effects on the academic performance and attitudes of those who receive tutoring. Tutored students outperformed control students on examinations, and they also developed positive attitudes toward the subject matter covered in the tutorial programs. The meta-analysis also showed that tutoring programs have positive effects on children who serve as tutors. Like the children they helped, the tutors gained a better understanding of and developed more positive attitudes toward the subject matter covered in the tutorial program. Participation in tutoring programs had little or no effect, however, on the self-esteem of tutors and tutees.
This paper presents a system for recognizing naturally occurring postures and associated affective states related to a child's interest level while performing a learning task on a computer. Postures are gathered using two matrices of pressure sensors mounted on the seat and back of a chair. Subsequently, posture features are extracted using a mixture of four gaussians, and input to a 3-layer feed-forward neural network. The neural network classifies nine postures in real time and achieves an overall accuracy of 87.6% when tested with postures coming from new subjects. A set of independent Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is used to analyze temporal patterns among these posture sequences in order to determine three categories related to a child's level of interest, as rated by human observers. The system reaches an overall performance of 82.3% with posture sequences coming from known subjects and 76.5% with unknown subjects.
Rating scales are ubiquitous measuring instruments, used widely in popular culture, in the physical, biological, and social sciences, as well as in the humanities. This chapter explains the critical distinction between interrater reliability and agreement, a distinction that is given little attention in other areas of measurement. We review design issues such as the type of replication and the level of measurement that researchers must consider in determining how to collect and analyze ratings data. However, the primary purpose of this chapter is to provide guidelines for selecting the appropriate statistical procedure for analyzing ratings data. Determining the proper procedure for calculating interrater reliability and interrater agreement requires a consideration of the level of measurement achieved by the rating scale and the intended use of the ratings. We also consider briefly the desirability of using weighting schemes for transforming nominal scale ratings to ordinal scale ratings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In the last few years, “Design Thinking” has gained popularity – it is now seen as an exciting new paradigm for dealing with problems in sectors as far a field as IT, Business, Education and Medicine. This potential success challenges the design research community to provide unambiguous answers to two key questions: “What is the core of Design Thinking?” and “What could it bring to practitioners and organisations in other fields?”. We sketch a partial answer by considering the fundamental reasoning pattern behind design, and then looking at the core design practices of framing and frame creation. The paper ends with an exploration of the way in which these core design practices can be adopted for organisational problem solving and innovation.Highlights► Analysing design reasoning in terms of abduction. ► Presenting a framework for the description of design practices. ► Investigating the creation of new frames as a key design practice. ► Describing the different levels on which design (framing) practices can impact organisations.
We present a study designed to assess the performance of biometric signals in detecting user affective states of students interacting with an educational game. We report observations from the study, and preliminary results from the data analysis.
As a method specifically intended for the study of messages, content analysis is fundamental to mass communication research. Intercoder reliability, more specifically termed intercoder agreement, is a measure of the extent to which independent judges make the same coding decisions in evaluating the characteristics of messages, and is at the heart of this method. Yet there are few standard and accessible guidelines available regarding the appropriate procedures to use to assess and report intercoder reliability, or software tools to calculate it. As a result, it seems likely that there is little consistency in how this critical element of content analysis is assessed and reported in published mass communication studies. Following a review of relevant concepts, indices, and tools, a content analysis of 200 studies utilizing content analysis published in the communication literature between 1994 and 1998 is used to characterize practices in the field. The results demonstrate that mass communication researchers often fail to assess (or at least report) intercoder reliability and often rely on percent agreement, an overly liberal index. Based on the review and these results, concrete guidelines are offered regarding procedures for assessment and reporting of this important aspect of content analysis.
In this paper we explore human tutors’ inferences in relation to learners’ affective states and the relationship between those
inferences and the actions that tutors take as their consequence. At the core of the investigations presented in this paper
lie fundamental questions associated with the role of affective considerations in computer-mediated educational interactions.
Theory of linguistic politeness is used as the basis for determining the contextual factors relevant to human tutors’s actions,
with special attention being dedicated to learner affective states. A study was designed to determine what affective states
of the learners are relevant to tutoring mathematics and to identify the mechanisms used by tutors to predict such states.
Logs of tutor-student dialogues were recorded along with contextual factors taken into consideration by tutors in relation
to their specific tutorial dialogue moves. The logs were annotated in order to determine the types and range of student and
tutor actions. Machine learning techniques were then applied to those actions to predict the values of three factors: student confidence, interest and effort. Whilst due to limited size and sparsity of data the results are not conclusive, they are very valuable as the basis for
empirically derived hypotheses to be tested in further studies. The potential implications of the hypotheses, if they were
confirmed by further studies, are discussed in relation to the impact of tutor’s ability to diagnose student affect on the
nature of computer-mediated tutorial interactions.
In the literature dealing with L2 teacher training and education numerous references are made to the concept of reflective teaching and teachers and teacher educators are encouraged to engage in reflective practices. The present paper, however, argues that in our attempt to empower teachers to become more efficient practitioners, we have lost sight of some important practical as well as theoretical considerations. Historically and theoretically, reflection has been influenced by many trends and philosophies which make the term reflection open to different interpretations. In addition, current reflective views lack a critical dimension since the emphasis has mostly been on rational aspects of the term. From a practical viewpoint, most of the stress has been on retrospective accounts of reflection, not on the prospective, creative aspects of the concept. Moreover, there is no evidence to show improved teacher or student performance resulting from reflective techniques and almost no acknowledgement of teachers’ personality in such discussions. Finally, too much emphasis on reflective practices and teachers’ practical knowledge might result in isolation from the language teaching discourse community.
Computer tools for cognitively challenging activities are considered use- ful, to a great extent, because of the support that they provide for human thinking and problem solving. To analyze, specify, and design cognitive support, a suitable an- alytic framework is required. Theories of ìdistributed cognitionî have been offered as potentially suitable frameworks, but they have generally failed to plainly artic- ulate comprehensive theories of cognitive support. This paper seeks to clarify the intellectual foundations for studying and designing cognitive support, and aims to put them in a form suitable for design. A framework called RODS is described as a type of minimal, lightweight intellectual toolkit. Its main aim is to allow analysts to think in high-level cognition-support terms rather than be overwhelmed by task- and technology-specic implementation details. Framing usefulness in terms of cognitive support makes it possible to dene abstract patterns of what makes tools ìgoodî. Im- plications are drawn for how the framework may be used for the design of tools in cognitively challenging work domains.
Grace is an intelligent tutoring system for COBOL which has been used to teach both novice and experienced programmers. While the tutor was quite effective in several classes and was designed with cognitive and interface principles in mind, we discuss a number of interesting issues that we have discovered when novice and experienced programmers used the tutor. Most of these problems are related to incompatibilities between the tutor interactions and the students' expectations in two areas: (1) the interactions with the tutor versus the interactions in their usual work environment and (2) the way in which experienced programmers solve problems. We describe these issues along with our solutions in the revised version of the tutor.
The value of involving people as ‘users’ or ‘participants’ in the design process is increasingly becoming a point of debate. In this paper we describe a new framework, called ‘informant design’, which advocates efficiency of input from different people: maximizing the value of contributions tlom various informants and design team members at different stages of the design process. To illustrate how this can be achieved we describe a project that uses children and teachers as informants at difTerent stages to help us design an interactive learning environment for teaching ecology.
As computing moves into every aspect of our daily lives, the values and assumptions that underlie our technical practices may unwittingly be propagated throughout our culture. Drawing on existing critical approaches in computing, we argue that reflection on unconscious values embedded in computing and the practices that it supports can and should be a core principle of technology design. Building on a growing body of work in critical computing, reflective design combines analysis of the ways in which technologies reflect and perpetuate unconscious cultural assumptions, with design, building, and evaluation of new computing devices that reflect alternative possibilities. We illustrate this approach through two design case studies.
Model-driven engineering approaches have turned out useful when handling different perspectives on human–computer interaction,
such as user profiles and problem-domain data. Their latest flavour, Model-Driven Architecture (MDA®), targets towards platform-independent models (PIMs) and adjacent transformation mechanisms to adapt to user needs and tasks.
Although in the field of user modelling and its major application domain, namely adaptive hypermedia systems (AHS), considerable
effort has been spent on adaptation towards user needs, a structured development approach could not be established so far.
User-oriented application designs are highly distinctive and can hardly be compared or mapped to novel or existing developments
without major re-engineering effort. This paper develops an understanding of existing capabilities of already applied user-modelling
techniques from a model-based perspective. Revealing the context of user models and user modelling allows determining general
concepts for representing and processing knowledge for adaptation. The obtained findings show primarily technically motivated
approaches, rather than designs grounded in findings from human factors. For human-centred design, a shift is suggested towards
distributed cognition as a methodological and operational frame of reference for user modelling. This could help overcome
existing limitations in adaptation. The corresponding research agenda requires directions on how to map psychological constructs
to user-model elements and adaptable user-interface elements, such as mapping field dependence to content annotation features,
in a transparent and empirically grounded way.
Although AI and HCI explore computing and intelligent behavior and the fields have seen some crossover, until recently there was not very much. This article outlines a history of the fields that identifies some of the forces that kept the fields at arm's length. AI was generally marked by a very ambitious, long-term vision requiring expensive systems, although the term was rarely envisioned as being as long as it proved to be, whereas HCI focused more on innovation and improvement of widely used hardware within a short time scale. These differences led to different priorities, methods, and assessment approaches. A consequence was competition for resources, with HCI flourishing in AI winters and moving more slowly when AI was in favor. The situation today is much more promising, in part because of platform convergence: AI can be exploited on widely used systems.
The more a computer knows about a user, the better it can serve that user. But there are different styles, and even philosophies, of how to teach our computers about us-about our habits, interests, patterns, and preferences. "Cheap" user modeling, the subject of this essay, simply means ascertaining a few bits of information about each user, processing that information quickly, and providing the results to applications, all without intruding upon the user's consciousness. In short, there are techniques for personalization that can-and should-be built into today's systems. Like most journal papers, this is a description of an existing system: DOPPELGÃNGER. But it is also an exhortation for readers to incorporate the described techniques and philosophy into their own systems.
We present a probabilistic model of user affect designed to allow an intelligent agent to recognise multiple user emotions during the interaction with an educational computer game. Our model is based on a probabilistic framework that deals with the high level of uncertainty involved in recognizing a variety of user emotions by combining in a Dynamic Bayesian Network information on both the causes and effects of emotional reactions. The part of the framework that reasons from causes to emotions (diagnostic model) implements a theoretical model of affect, the OCC model, which accounts for how emotions are caused by one's appraisal of the current context in terms of one's goals and preferences. The advantage of using the OCC model is that it provides an affective agent with explicit information not only on which emotions a user feels but also why, thus increasing the agent's capability to effectively respond to the users' emotions. The challenge is that building the model requires having mechanisms to assess user goals and how the environment fits them, a form of plan recognition. In this paper, we illustrate how we built the predictive part of the affective model by combining general theories with empirical studies to adapt the theories to our target application domain. We then present results on the model's accuracy, showing that the model achieves good accuracy on several of the target emotions. We also discuss the model's limitations, to open the ground for the next stage of the work, i.e., complementing the model with diagnostic information.
This paper presents a general statistical methodology for the analysis of multivariate categorical data arising from observer reliability studies. The procedure essentially involves the construction of functions of the observed proportions which are directed at the extent to which the observers agree among themselves and the construction of test statistics for hypotheses involving these functions. Tests for interobserver bias are presented in terms of first-order marginal homogeneity and measures of interobserver agreement are developed as generalized kappa-type statistics. These procedures are illustrated with a clinical diagnosis example from the epidemiological literature.
Developmental dyslexia, or specific reading disability, is a disorder in which children with normal intelligence and sensory abilities show learning deficits for reading. Substantial evidence has established its biological origin and the preponderance of phonological disorders even though important phenotypic variability and comorbidity have been recorded. Diverse theories have been proposed to account for the cognitive and neurological aspects of dyslexia. Findings of genetic studies show that different loci affect specific reading disability although a direct relation has not been established between symptoms and a given genomic locus. In both children and adults with dyslexia, results of neuroimaging studies suggest defective activity and abnormal connectivity between regions crucial for language functions--eg, the left fusiform gyrus for reading--and changes in brain activity associated with performance improvement after various remedial interventions.
This paper presents a novel framework for looking at the problem of diagnosing a student's knowledge in an Intelligent Tutoring System. It is indicated that the input and the conceptualisation of the student model are significant for the choice of modelling technique. The framework regards student diagnosis as the process of bridging the gap between the student's input to the tutoring system, and the system's concept and representation of correct knowledge. The process of bridging the gap can be subdivided into three issues, data acquisition, transformation and evaluation, which are studied further. A number of published student modelling techniques are studied with respect to how they bridge the gap. This work has been financed by NUTEK. Accepted for publication in User Modeling and User--Adapted Interaction. 1995 95-36 0 1 Student diagnosis in practice; Bridging a gap E. L. Ragnemalm Department of Computer and Information Science, Linkping University, S-581 83 Linkping, Sweden...
Learning difficulties: Future challenges. A paper prepared as part of the Foresight Review on Mental Capital and Wellbeing
- U Goswami
Goswami, U., 2008. Learning difficulties: Future challenges. A paper prepared as part of the Foresight Review on Mental
Capital and Wellbeing, accessed from http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/foresight/docs/mental-capital/learning_difficulties.pdf
Student diagnosis in practice; bridging a gap. User Modelling and User-Adapted Interaction
- E L Ragnemalm
Ragnemalm, E. L., 1995. Student diagnosis in practice; bridging a gap. User Modelling and User-Adapted Interaction,
5(2), pp. 93-116.
Identifying and Teaching Children and Young People with Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties
- J Rose
Rose, J., 2009. Identifying and Teaching Children and Young People with Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties. Report for
the Department of Children, Schools and Families, June 2009.
Designing from the Sidelines: Design in a Technology-Centered Serious Game Project In Proceedings of CHI Workshop ‘Let's talk about Failures: Why was the Game for Children not a Success?
- A Vasalou
- R Khaled
Vasalou, A. and Khaled, R., 2013. Designing from the Sidelines: Design in a Technology-Centered Serious Game Project.
Proceedings of CHI Workshop "Let's talk about Failures: Why was the Game for Children not a Success?"