Nancy Vye

LEARNING BY TEACHING: A NEW AGENT PARADIGM FOR EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE

ABSTRACT This paper discusses Bettys Brain, a teachable agent in the domain of river ecosystems that combines learning by teaching with self-regulation mentoring to promote deep learning and understanding. Two studies demonstrate the effectiveness of this system. The first study focused on components that define student-teacher interactions in the learning by teaching task. The second study examined the value of adding meta-cognitive strategies that governed Bettys behavior and self-regulation hints provided by a mentor agent. The study compared three versions: a system where the student was tutored by a pedagogical agent, a learning by teaching system, where students taught a baseline version of Betty, and received tutoring help from the mentor, and a learning by teaching system, where Betty was enhanced to include self-regulation strategies, and the mentor provided help on domain material on how to become better learners and better teachers. Results indicate that the addition of the self-regulated Betty and the self-regulation mentor better prepared students to learn new concepts later, even when they no longer had access to the SRL environment.

Rethinking advanced high school coursework: tackling the depth/breadth tension in the AP US Government and Politics course

This paper reports a design experiment that attempted to strike a balance between coverage and learning in an exam-oriented, college-preparatory, high school course—Advanced Placement (AP) US Government and Politics. Theoretically, the study provides a conceptual framework for penetrating the depth/breadth tension in such courses, which are known for coverage and perhaps ‘rigour’, but lag behind contemporary research on how people learn and what learning is. Methodologically, the paper details a mixed-methods study of an alternative approach to AP coursework, conducted with 314 students across three high schools. First-year findings indicate that a course of semi-repetitive, content-rich project cycles can lead to same or higher scores on the AP exam along with deeper conceptual learning, but that attention is needed to a collateral problem: orienting students to a new kind of coursework.

Dynamic visual support for story comprehension and mental model building by young, at-risk children

Multimedia technology allows precise coordination of linguistic and visual information and may provide teachers with tools for enhancing literacy foundations in children–especially those who might otherwise be at-risk for school failure. This research explores the hypothesis that a multimedia environment with dynamic visual support facilitates language comprehension when children listen to short stories. Kindergarten children heard stories in three conditions: Helpful video, in which dynamic, silent video accompanied the beginning of stories; No video, in which children only heard the stories; and Minimal video, in which static images of characters and places accompanied the beginning of stories. In all conditions, the ending of the story was presented without visual support. Overall, the pattern of results suggests that dynamic visual support can provide a framework for understanding and remembering linguistic information.

Gender Representation and Humanoid Robots Designed for Domestic Use

Humanoid robots’ appearance and behavior provide social cues about their purpose and abilities. However, little is known about how a robot’s gender representation will affect users in everyday home use scenarios. This paper presents the results of a study exploring people’s expectations of humanoid robots, or androids, designed for home use. Results of this study demonstrated participants’ willingness to attribute human roles and tasks to an android, although they did not indicate an overall preference for the robot as a social actor. In addition, following the viewing of video stimulus featuring human-robot interactions, robot gender issues surfaced during open-ended interviews.

Beyond Breadth-Speed-Test: Toward Deeper Knowing and Engagement in an Advanced Placement Course

We report a mixed-methods design experiment that aims to achieve deeper learning in a breadth-oriented, college-preparatory course—AP U.S. Government and Politics. The study was conducted with 289 students in 12 classrooms across four schools and in an “excellence for all” context of expanding enrollments in AP courses. Contributions include its investigation of a model of deeper learning, development of a test to assess it, and fusion of project-based learning with a traditional curriculum. Findings suggest that a course of quasi-repetitive projects can lead to higher scores on the AP test but a floor effect on the assessment of deeper learning. Implications are drawn for assessing deeper learning and helping students adapt to shifts in the grammar of schooling.

Intelligent user interface design for teachable agent systems

This paper describes the interface components for a system called Bettys Brain, an intelligent agent we have developed for studying the learning by teaching paradigm. Our previous studies have shown that students gain better understanding of domain knowledge when they prepare to teach others versus when they prepare to take an exam. This finding has motivated us to develop computer agents that students teach using concept map representations with a visual interface. Betty is intelligent not because she learns on her own, but because she can apply qualitative-reasoning techniques to answer questions that are directly related to what she has been taught through the concept map. We evaluate the agents interfaces in terms of how well they support learning activities, using examples of their use by fifth grade students in an extensive study that we performed in a Nashville public school. A critical analysis of the outcome of our studies has led us to propose the next generation interfaces in a multi-agent paradigm that should be more effective in promoting constructivist learning and self-regulation in the learning by teaching framework

Differences in judgments of learning difficulty.

Academically successful and less successful fifth graders were asked to make judgments about the ease of understanding and remembering various sentences and were given the opportunity to attempt to remember some of them before being asked to judge new sets of sentences. The results of the first experiment indicate that, at the beginning of the experiment, the successful students were much more likely than their less successful peers to realize that sentences expressing arbitrary relationships were more difficult to remember. These differences became even greater after students were given the opportunity to attempt to remember some of the sentences they had judged initially. The memory performance of the successful students also improved as they became more familiar with the experimental task, but the performance of the less successful students did not. The results of the second experiment showed that less successful students who had received appropriate training were able to use information about the arbitrariness of relationships as the basis for their judgments of learning difficulty. The training also facilitated their ability to remember. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Adaptive People and Adaptive Systems: Issues of Learning and Design

The United States is not the only nation facing these issues. As Darling-Hammond explains, “Nations around the world are reforming their school systems to meet these new demands;” they are “revising curriculum, instruction, and assessment to support the more complex knowledge and skills needed in the twenty-first century – skills needed for framing problems, seeking and organizing information and resources, and working strategically with others to manage and address dilemmas and create new products.”

Constraints on effective pictorial and verbal elaboration

Three experiments investigated the conditions under which pictures facilitate learning. In Experiment 1, confusing verbal relationships were supplemented with pictures that illustrated the key concepts in each verbal relationship (base pictures), illustrated the key concepts in more elaborate arbitrary relationships (pictures of arbitrary elaborations), or illustrated the key concepts in ways that helped clarify the verbal relationships (pictures of explanatory elaborations). All three types of pictures facilitated the retention of the verbal relationships, although pictures of explanatory elaborations were superior to other types of visual illustrations. In Experiment 2, the facilitative effects of base pictures depended on a schematically unique illustration of the key concepts in a single image. In Experiment 3, picture facilitation effects were constrained by the type of verbal elaborations that accompanied the pictures. Specifically, base pictures and pictures of arbitrary elaborations did not facilitate the retention of confusing verbal relationships that were elaborated with explanatory information, and actually interfered with the retention of those explanatory elaborations. The implications of these results are discussed.

Improving the Quality of Instruction: Roles for Dynamic Assessment

Dynamic assessment is a relatively new and promising approach to educational evaluation. The term dynamic assessment, as defined in this discussion, refers to attempts to assess individuals’ responsiveness to teaching (Feuerstein, Rand, & Hoffman, 1979) or “zone of sensitivity to instruction” (Vygotsky, 1978; Wood, 1980; Wood, Wood, & Middleton, 1978). The methods of assessment are different from those used in standardized, “static” assessments such as intelligence tests and achievement tests, where instruction on the part of the testor invalidates results. In dynamic assessment, instruction is essential. The critical components of dynamic assessment are systematic attempts (a) to change various components of tasks in order to assure that the examinee understands what is required, and (b) to experiment with different approaches to teaching the examinee how to complete the task. Both of these elements are included in order to determine specific instructional techniques that are most effective for each child.