Pierpaolo Vittorini

Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning

This volume presents recent research on Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning. It contains the contributions of MIS4TEL 2015, which took place in Salamanca, Spain,. On June 3rd to 5th 2015. Like the previous edition, this proceedings and the conference is an open forumfor discussing intelligent systems for Technology Enhanced Learning and empirical methodologies for their design or evaluation MIS4TEL 15 conference has been organized by University of L aquila, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and the University of Salamanca.

Adapting with Evidence: The Adaptive Model and the Stimulation Plan of TERENCE

TERENCE is an FP7 ICT European project that aims at developing an adaptive learning system for supporting learners and educators. The TERENCE learners are 7-8 to 11 year old children with poor reading comprehension skills. The TERENCE educators are primary-school teachers, support teachers and parents. This paper describes the stimulation plan for the TERENCE learners, based on clinical practice, and the adaptive learning model of TERENCE that stems from the stimulation plan. In other words, the design of the model follows the evidence based design.

The User Classes Building Process in a TEL Project

Nowadays, circa 10% of 7-11 olds turn out to be poor comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inference making, despite proficiency in low-level cognitive skills like word reading. To improve the reading comprehension of these children, TERENCE, a technology enhanced learning project, aims at stimulating inference-making about stories. In order to design and develop the TERENCE system, we use a user centred design approach that requires an in depth study of the system’s main end-users, namely, its learners and educators. This paper reports the user classes building process for learners by means of user-centred design field studies.

Evaluation Plan of TERENCE: When the User-Centred Design Meets the Evidence-Based Approach

TERENCE is an FP7 EU project that aims at developing an adaptive learning system with the twofold objective of helping children in improve deep text understanding, and supporting teachers in their daily work. The present paper focuses on the design of the evaluation of the pedagogical effectiveness and the usability of the TERENCE software. It starts from the user-centred design experience, evidence-based medicine, psychology, and from discussions about statistical methods and ethics considerations. The objective is to provide an innovative, evidence-based and efficient support, for children and teachers, that could be an efficient alternative to the traditional method of reading, so as to prevent and reduce problems of text comprehension that represent a public health and social problem. For this purpose, we developed an evaluation protocol within a reading laboratory in collaboration with teachers, to be hosted in the school structures that will join the project in Italy.

The Learners' User Classes in the TERENCE Adaptive Learning System

Nowadays, circa 10% of 7-11 olds turn out to be poor comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, related to inference making, despite proficiency in low-level cognitive skills like word reading. To improve the reading comprehension of these children, TERENCE, a technology enhanced learning project, aims at stimulating inference-making about stories. In order to design and develop the TERENCE system, we use a user centred design approach that requires an in depth study of the systems main end-users, namely, its learners and educators. This paper reports on the specification of the user classes for the TERENCE learners by means of user-centred design field studies, the resulting global system architecture, and an example use case of the system, with few related GUIs snapshots.

The User and Domain Models of the TERENCE Adaptive Learning System

TERENCE is an FP7 ICT European project that aims at developing an adaptive learning system for supporting learners and educators: the TERENCE learners are 7-8 to 11 year old children with poor reading comprehension skills; the TERENCE educators are primary-school teachers, support teachers and parents. The analyses of the context of use and requirements of the TERENCE system are based on real data. Therefore also the design of the conceptual model of the TERENCE system is based on real data. This paper describes the domain and user model of the TERENCE system, and its evidence-based design process.

XML technologies for the Omaha System: A data model, a Java tool and several case studies supporting home healthcare

The eXtensible markup language (XML) is a metalanguage which is useful to represent and exchange data between heterogeneous systems. XML may enable healthcare practitioners to document, monitor, evaluate, and archive medical information and services into distributed computer environments. Therefore, the most recent proposals on electronic health records (EHRs) are usually based on XML documents. Since none of the existing nomenclatures were specifically developed for use in automated clinical information systems, but were adapted to such use, numerous current EHRs are organized as a sequence of events, each represented through codes taken from international classification systems. In nursing, a hierarchically organized problem-solving approach is followed, which hardly couples with the sequential organization of such EHRs. Therefore, the paper presents an XML data model for the Omaha System taxonomy, which is one of the most important international nomenclatures used in the home healthcare nursing context. Such a data model represents the formal definition of EHRs specifically developed for nursing practice. Furthermore, the paper delineates a Java application prototype which is able to manage such documents, shows the possibility to transform such documents into readable web pages, and reports several case studies, one currently managed by the home care service of a Health Center in Central Italy.

A SOA statistical engine for biomedical data

Currently, large efforts are spent to develop standards and architectures useful to achieve more effective interoperability among medical information systems. Despite such efforts, there are no researches produced so far to directly analyse, with statistical methods, biomedical data represented as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents. Thus, the paper proposes an architecture which offers a twofold approach to the statistical analysis of XML data, i.e. via a web service and by extending the query languages used in XML databases. To show how the architecture can be used, a sample system is also reported. Finally, the paper ends by reporting the advantages and drawbacks of the proposed approach in comparison with classic statistical packages.

An AI-Based Process for Generating Games from Flat Stories

TERENCE is an FP7 ICT European project that is developing an adaptive learning system for supporting poor comprehenders and their educators. Its learning material are books of stories and games. The so-called smart games serve to stimulate story comprehension. This paper focuses on the analysis of flat stories with a specific annotation language and the generation of smart games from the analysed texts, mixing natural language processing and temporal constraint-reasoning technologies. The paper ends commenting on the approach to the automated analysis and extraction of information from stories for specific users and domains, briefly evaluating the benefits of the semi-automated generation process in terms of production costs.

User-centred and evidence-based design of smart games for poor text comprehenders: the TERENCE experience

More than 10% of children in the age range 7-11 turn out to be poor text comprehenders: they have difficulties in reasoning about events of a story. TERENCE is the first adaptive learning system with stories and companion smart games, for reasoning about stories, and developed for primary-school poor comprehenders. The development of TERENCE followed both the user-centred and the evidence-based design methodologies, by placing users at the centre of the development process and by choosing a design because of evidence of its effectiveness for the users. This paper presents the TERENCE smart games: it explains how such methodologies were used for iteratively designing and evaluating incrementally improved versions of the TERENCE smart games.