Arlene Weiner

Automated Advice-Giving Strategies for Scientific Inquiry

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.

Belvedere: stimulating students' critical discussion

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.

An interface for collaborative and coached approaches to learning critical inquiry

The sof-lsvare to be demonstrated has been designed to support learning of critical inquiry skills, particularly in science. The sotlware includes a graphical “inquiry diagram” interface for the construction of arguments, a coach that comments on the inquiry process via this interface, and associated tools for collaborative learning. Research issues include interface design in support of coaching and collaborative learning.