Vu Minh Chieu

Student Modeling in Orthopedic Surgery Training: Exploiting Symbiosis between Temporal Bayesian Networks and Fine-grained Didactic Analysis

Cognitive approaches have been used for student modeling in intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Many of those systems have tackled fundamental subjects such as mathematics, physics, and computer programming. The change of the students cognitive behavior over time, however, has not been considered and modeled systematically. Furthermore, the nature of domain knowledge in specific subjects such as orthopedic surgery, in which pragmatic knowledge could play an important role, has also not been taken into account deliberately. We believe that the temporal dimension in modeling the students knowledge state and cognitive behavior is critical, especially in such domains. In this paper, we propose an approach for student modeling and diagnosis, which is based on a symbiosis between temporal Bayesian networks and fine-grained didactic analysis. The latter may help building a powerful domain knowledge model and the former may help modeling the learners complex cognitive behavior, so as to be able to provide him or her with relevant feedback during a problem-solving process. To illustrate the application of the approach, we designed and developed several key components of an intelligent learning environment for teaching the concept of sacro-iliac screw fixation in orthopedic surgery, for which we videotaped and analyzed six surgical interventions in a French hospital. A preliminary gold-standard validation suggests that our diagnosis component is able to produce coherent diagnosis with acceptable response time.

An Analysis of Evaluative Comments in Teachers' Online Discussions of Representations of Practice.

It has been common to use video records of instruction in teacher professional development, but participants have rarely been encouraged to evaluate teachers and students’ actions in those records, allegedly because evaluation deters from the development of a professional discourse. In this study, we inspected teachers’ online discussions of animations of classroom episodes realized with cartoon characters, looking at the difference in the content of conversation turns when members made evaluative comments and when they did not make evaluative comments. We were interested in finding out whether making evaluative comments correlated with participants’ reflection on their professional practice and proposal of alternative teaching actions; for that purpose we used systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to develop a coding scheme that attended to evaluation, alternatives, and reflection in forum discussions. We found statistically significant evidence that the more the participants actively evaluated the teaching in the animations, the more they proposed alternative teaching actions and reflected on instructional practice. We relate these findings to the notion of social presence in online discussions.

How Can Designed Reference Points in an Animated Classroom Story Support Teachers’ Study of Practice?

The notion of reference point has been proposed by Wise, Padmanabham, and Duffy to allude to artifacts shared in an online learning experience and that participants might refer to as they interact online. Representations of instructional practice in the forms of video records, animations, and so on, are examples of such reference points that have been useful in teacher education. Each classroom episode, however, can be seen to contain many different events, and audiences seem to respond differently to different events. To investigate what varies as participant attend to different events, we propose a refinement of the definition by Wise, Padmanabham, and Duffy, calling the whole artifact a reference object and saving the expression reference point for subsets of a reference object. The study reported in this chapter provides evidence that use of an animated classroom story, as a reference object, with breaches of instructional norms installed in it, as reference points, is associated with the presence of comments of high quality—measured by the presence of markers of evaluation of and reflection on actions of teaching as well as proposal of alternative actions of teaching in the comments—from teachers.