Joel A. Michael

Development of self-directed learning behaviors in a partially teacher-directed problem-based learning curriculum.

Data from three sources (self‐reports of students, review of accreditation and program evaluation documents, and library circulation statistics) supported the hypothesis that students in a problem‐based learning (PBL) curriculum with significant teacher‐centered components nevertheless acquire behaviors reflecting self‐directed learning skills. These PBL students exhibited differences in the extent to which their learning was self‐directed when compared to lecture‐based students. The learning process and features of this partially teacher‐directed, PBL program that fostered the development of self‐directed learning are discussed. Development of these skills depended on the curriculums adherence to the use of student‐generated learning issues as a guide for defining content to be learned, but also on several other factors.

Effect of intravenous sodium bicarbonate, disodium edetate (Na2EDTA), and hyperventilation on visual and oculomotor signs in multiple sclerosis.

The effects of procedures believed to produce a decrease in serum ionized calcium were tested on visual and oculomotor function in nine multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. Transient improvement in scotomas, nystagmus, and oculomotor paresis occurred with intravenous infusions of NaHCO3 or Na2EDTA. Hyperventilation was also tested for its effect on nystagmus and caused marked decreases in frequency. Control experiments with saline infusions did not produce any effect. The probable mechanism and site of action for these effects is discussed. This study demonstrates that certain signs and symptoms in MS can be altered favourably by changes in the internal chemical environment and offers a new approach to the search for a symptomatic therapy in MS.

Classifying Student Initiatives and Tutor Responses in Human Keyboard-to-Keyboard Tutoring Sessions

This study analyzed twenty-eight 1-hr-long tutoring sessions that were carried out keyboard-to-keyboard with tutor and student in different rooms. The tutors were professors of physiology at Rush Medical College. The students were 1st-year medical students. We classified student initiatives and tutor responses in human tutoring sessions with the goal of making our intelligent tutoring system capable of handling mixed-initiative dialogue. Student initiatives were classified along 4 dimensions: communicative goal, surface form, focus of attention, and degree of certainty (i.e., does the student hedge or not?). Student goals included request for confirmation, request for information, challenge, refusal to answer, and conversational repair. Tutor responses were classified along 3 dimensions: communicative goal, surface form, and delivery mode. The tutor goals included causal explanation, acknowledgment, conversational repair, instruction in the rules of the game, teaching the problem-solving algorithm, and teaching the language of physiology. Our interrater reliability studies supported these categories in the domain of tutoring.

Circsim-tutor: an intelligent tutoring system for circulatory physiology

The aim of this research is to develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) which teaches students the causal relationships between the components of the circulatory physiology system and the complex behavior of the negative feedback system that stabilizes blood pressure. This system will accept natural language input from students and generate limited natural language explanations. It contains rules that identify the students errors and build a “bug-based” student model. It uses tutoring rules to plan each response based on its model of the student and the dialog history so that it can tailor the dialog to fit the students learning needs. The tutoring rule interpreter manages the dialog and determines strategy and tactics to achieve its educational goals.

An intelligent tutoring system that generates a natural language dialogue using dynamic multi-level planning

OBJECTIVE The objective of this research was to build an intelligent tutoring system capable of carrying on a natural language dialogue with a student who is solving a problem in physiology. Previous experiments have shown that students need practice in qualitative causal reasoning to internalize new knowledge and to apply it effectively and that they learn by putting their ideas into words. METHODS Analysis of a corpus of 75 hour-long tutoring sessions carried on in keyboard-to-keyboard style by two professors of physiology at Rush Medical College tutoring first-year medical students provided the rules used in tutoring strategies and tactics, parsing, and text generation. The system presents the student with a perturbation to the blood pressure, asks for qualitative predictions of the changes produced in seven important cardiovascular variables, and then launches a dialogue to correct any errors and to probe for possible misconceptions. The natural language understanding component uses a cascade of finite-state machines. The generation is based on lexical functional grammar. RESULTS Results of experiments with pretests and posttests have shown that using the system for an hour produces significant learning gains and also that even this brief use improves the students ability to solve problems more then reading textual material on the topic. Student surveys tell us that students like the system and feel that they learn from it. The system is now in regular use in the first-year physiology course at Rush Medical College. CONCLUSION We conclude that the CIRCSIM-Tutor system demonstrates that intelligent tutoring systems can implement effective natural language dialogue with current language technology.

Promoting Active Learning in the Life Science Classroom: Defining the Issues

Anyone exposed to the news media in this country must be aware of the crisis in American education. For more than a decade, the headlines have informed us that something is wrong with the way we educate our children and that, as a consequence, we have become “a nation at risk.”’ Every critique of the American educational scene, from kindergarten to professional school, has agreed that our students memorize too many facts but cannot use those facts to solve problems. Numerous comparisons of academic achievement in a wide variety of disciplines across a wide range of countries has shown that the achievement of American students is near the bottom of the list. As educators we seem to be failing our students, and calls for reform are widespread. This crisis is as evident in the life science classroom as it is in every other classroom. Whether we examine “biology education in the nation’s [elementary and high] schools”2 or the teaching of pre-clinical biomedical sciences in our medical schools,3 we find the same kinds of criticisms and the same calls for reform. We ask our students to assimilate information, but we don’t require them to use that information. We provide them with too many passive learning experiences (lectures), too many “cookbook laboratory experiences, and too few opportunities for active learning that can lead to the development of problem solving skills and an appreciation for science as a person. We must change how we teach! The growing awareness of the need for significant change in American education has occurred at a time when the cognitive sciences and educational psychology are making substantial progress in understanding what learning means and the processes that promote it.4 While there is, as yet, no specific prescription for assisting life science students in achieving meaningful learning, what has been learned can make a real difference in how and what we teach. Another important development is a growing recognition that teaching must regain its importance on our college campuses? Teaching is a scholarly activity that can and should be evaluated and rewarded as such. But like all scholarly activities, the results of our efforts need to be communicated to our peers so that our ideas can be critiqued and so that others can benefit from them. The sponsorship by the New York Academy of Sciences of this “Promoting

Roles of Student-Generated Learning Issues in Problem-Based Learning.

Structured interviews were conducted with key faculty representing seven North American problem‐based learning curricula on their programs’ use of student‐generated learning issues. These are learning objectives that the students decide are prerequisites to a better understanding of the problem. The implementation of problem‐based learning at each of these schools varies. The uses of student‐generated learning issues have evolved and changed in terms of content definition, directing examination planning, student evaluation, and curriculum review. These varied uses form a continuum for defining curricular content to be mastered. At six of these seven schools, students may have access to faculty objectives. Student‐generated learning issues have been de‐emphasized in favor of faculty objectives and reading lists at two schools. At five of the seven schools, students are evaluated on their ability to generate learning issues. The survey results suggest that these curricula may be encouraging the development ...

Dynamic instructional planning for an intelligent physiology tutoring system

An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that will assist first-year medical students in learning the causal relationships between the parameters of the circulatory system and in solving problems of disturbances to the system is discussed. The central component of the ITS, the instructional planner, is responsible for determining what to do next at each point during a tutoring session. The approach taken is to build the planner by combining the capabilities of lesson planning and discourse planning in order to provide globally coherent and adaptive instruction. The planner consists of two parts: a lesson planner and a discourse planner. The lesson planner generates lesson plans, which the discourse planner carries out. A sample dialogue, extracted from the transcript of an actual human tutor-student interaction, is used to provide a framework for the development of the overall system, especially from the planners point of view.<<ETX>>

Computer dialogue system (CDS) : a system for capturing computer-mediated dialogue

In the process of studying human tutoring sessions as a basis for building an intelligent tutoring system, we developed a computer dialogue system (CDS) that allows two PC users to communicate with each other over a telephone line by typing at a computer keyboard. CDS records the content of dialogue on a disk in a specified, well-formatted way. It also makes available a way to mimic some of the characteristics of face-to-face dialogue such as repair. It was developed in the Smartcom III (Hayes Communication package) environment. Thus, it is fast, portable, and easy to use. In addition, to help us study the recorded dialogues, we have also written a numbering program to label each turn and each sentence within each turn. Although CDS was originally designed for the study of tutorial dialogues between students and teachers, it can be used to conduct and record dialogues of any kind.

The second Conceptual Assessment in the Biological Sciences workshop

A second National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop on Conceptual Assessment in Biology was held in January 2008. Reports prepared for the workshop revealed that research groups working in a variety of biological sciences are continuing to develop conceptual assessment instruments for use in the classroom. Discussions at this meeting largely focused on two issues: 1) the utility of the backwards design approach of Wiggins and McTighe (11), in which identification of learning outcomes (determining what to assess) lies at the beginning of course design; and 2) the utility of defining expected learning outcomes as the building of runable mental models (and designing conceptual assessments that would test the correctness of these mental models). A third meeting is being planned that will focus on the processes involved in writing and validating conceptual assessment instruments.