Arlene Weiner’s research while affiliated with University of Pittsburgh and other places

We describe a prototype advisor for students using Belvedere, an environment for conducting discussions about scientific controversies. The advisor has two strategic components, syntactic and consistency-based. Syntactic strategies are based on structural and categorical patterns in argument representations constructed by the students, and suggest ways in which students can continue their inquiry. Consistency-based strategies check student-made links between pairs of statements against the pairwise relations specified between corresponding units in a knowledge base constructed by a teacher or expert, and identify information that may challenge or corroborate relationships proposed by the students.

Scientific knowledge is dynamic in two senses: it changes and increases extremely rapidly, and it is thrust from the lab into the wider world and the public forum almost as rapidly. These trends place increasing demands on secondary school science education. Besides knowing key facts, concepts, and procedures, it is important for today's students to understand the process by which the claims of science are generated, evaluated, and revised - an interplay between theoretical and empirical work (Dunbar & Klahr, 1989). The educational goals behind the work reported in this chapter are to improve students' understanding of this process, facilitating students' acquisition of critical inquiry skills while also meeting conventional subject matter learning objectives. In addition to the need to change what is taught, there are grounds to change how it is taught. Research shows that students learn better when they actively pursue understanding rather than passively receiving knowledge (Brown & Campione 1994; Chi et al. 1989; Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Greeno et al. 1996; Resnick & Chi, 1988; Perkins et al. 1985; Webb & Palincsar, 1996). Accordingly, the classroom teacher is now being urged to become a "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage." In parallel, new roles have been recommended for artificial intelligence applications to education, replacing computer-directed learning with software that augments the learning processes of students engaged in collaborative critical inquiry (Chan & Baskin, 1988; O'Neill & Gomez, 1994; Roschelle, 1994; Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994). The present chapter describes an educational software package, known as "Belvedere," that supports students collaboratively solving ill-structured problems in science and other areas (such as public policy) as they develop critical inquiry skills. Belvedere exemplifies two ways in which artificial intelligence can contribute to student-centered approaches to learning: by informing the design of representational systems that constrain and guide learner's activities, and by responding dynamically to representations that learners construct in these representational systems.

We describe an "expert coach" for students' collaborative information seeking and knowledge construction. This coach compares an expert's prespecification of the evidential relations among "snippets" of HTML-based text with the current state of a diagram constructed by students in the course of collaborative scientific inquiry. The expert advises the students by pointing out information that may challenge the students' views. 1 Introduction This paper describes our current work in providing students with expert feedback as they engage in collaborative scientific inquiry. Our advice-giving subsystem, part of a larger system known as Belvedere, comprises two primary components: an argument "coach" [2], and an expert "coach" (see companion paper in these proceedings [7] for more details about the architecture). The students' task is to seek and integrate information about a scientific controversy. The system provides a facility for them to construct an "inquiry diagram" to represent the...

To be successful, CSCL technology must be adopted by teachers and incorporated into the activities of the classroom. This paper describes a comprehensive approach to supporting teachers learning to implement computer-supported collaborative inquiry in their classrooms. The approach comprises (1) a networked software system, "Belvedere," that provides students with shared workspaces for coordinating and recording their collaboration in scientific inquiry; (2) activity plans worked out collaboratively with teachers; (3) "challenge problems" and Web-based materials designed to match and enrich the curriculum, and (4) self- and peer-assessment instruments given to students to guide the process of scientific inquiry. A fundamental aim of this work is to restructure the classroom and shift the initiative for learning activity to the students.

An abstract is not available.

We describe "Belvedere," a system to support students engaged in critical discussion of science and public policy issues. The design is intended to address cognitive and metacognitive limitations of unpracticed beginners while supporting their practice of this complex skill. The limitations include (1) difficulty in focusing attention given the abstract and complex nature of theories and arguments, (2) lack of domain knowledge, and (3) lack of motivation. Belvedere addresses these limitations by (1) giving arguments a concrete diagrammatic form, and providing tools for focusing on particular problems encountered in the construction and evaluation of complex arguments; (2) providing access to on-line information resources; and (3) supporting students working in small groups to construct documents to be shared with others. Both prior psychological research and formative evaluation studies with users shaped the interface design. KEYWORDS: Collaborative Argumentation Environment, Educatio...

Increasingly, social and collaborative processes are seen as central to the development of thinking skills, including the skills of scientific thinking. With colleagues we have developed a software system (Belvedere) to support high-school science students in engaging in collaborative reasoning and argumentation. We discuss how Belvedere is designed to support students' collaborative processes, describe our formative evaluation studies, and provide examples of student sessions. Reflecting on students' inter-actions with Belvedere and each other, we then discuss the competencies and limitations of students in developing scientific argumentation and reasoning, as distinguished from and supported by their practice of everyday argumentation..

Computer environments could support students in engaging in cognitive activities that are essential to scientific practice and to the understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, but that are difficult to manage in science classrooms. The authors describe a design for a computer-based environment to assist students in conducting dialectical activities of constructing, comparing, and evaluating arguments for competing scientific theories. Their choice of activities and their design respond to educators' and theorists' criticisms of current science curricula. They give detailed specifications of portions of the environment. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.