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After I read this I become more worried about our students especially in secondary schools. There were SBS (exam for entering high schools) and they were taking 3 different exams at each grade, 6,7,8 but now with the new regulations they will have 36 exams. Apart from that in 10 years the system has changed for 5 times. what can be more devastating their chilhood than that?

I agree with you about the testing system in Turkey but it is only the top of the iceberg. For me, childhood ends for children who start the formal education in Turkey. Our system is so demanding and competitive that children cannot endure the difficulties they encounter. First of all, we have very overloaded curricula and students always need to be alert and hardworking to keep up with the required activities. While trying to make use of constructivist understanding curriculum developers missed some points: the opportunities and facilities the schools and students have, the difficulty level of activities, background of the learner and student and parent profile in Turkey, teacher characteristics in our schools and so on. The curricula cannot be implemeted in most of the schools so teachers invented their own methods and techniques which do not match to any of the instructional theories properly. Parents started to find out ways to protect their children and they made lots of mistakes. For example, some parents do projects of their children and smarter children started to sell ready-made projects at schools. Although teachers know the truth, he grade these projects because the system makes it nearly impossible to fail. In short, our system is working but not in the way writen in the curricula. The changes, negativities and difficulties in the system is damaging the childhood and future of the students. Somebody should change it, not the curricula:)

World is getting more populated, and each individual wants to have a better life. And a better life is significantly related to education. So, exams still appear to be a "must" in this racing system. Actually, I am a supporter of the exams if we want to have a more "fair race". I remember the terrible old days when successful people couldn't get what they deserved because of the bribery system in Turkey. On the other hand, I agree about the side effects of the overtesting. And as an individual who has been exposed to overtesting, the question I ask to myself is "How has the overtesting affected my mental health?" The truth is I have been stressed, depressed and sad because of the tests :(

it seems that we will try to go to some Chinese Universities in ten years time, instead of Europe or States.

In my opinion education policy of the countries do not be planned based on the students' academic achievement. Real achievement of an education system could be observed as individuals' adaptation to life. For example the main vision of the elementary science curriculum defined by Ministry of National Education of Turkey [MONE] (2005) is that regardless of the individual differences of students, they are educated to become scientifically literate, the uniqueness nature of the learner; background and culture of the learners and motivation of the learners were taken into consideration in the development of the curriculum (MONE, 2005), but putting those in the practice is very difficult.

Also, as mentioned in the text "… those results come at the cost of one of the highest levels of student anxiety in the world." Anxiety is very important and big research area in educational psychology also the news in the link http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-04/10/content_9710997.htm exemplifies its importance in Chinese case.

Turkey has been undergoing education reforms because of the same reason" ..the current system was designed and conceived for a different age..." Do you think the reformed curricula meet the requirements of 21st century? I think wee need to reform the minds of people who are designing the curricula in this country...

It is like imitating other countries and take their education systems for granted rathr than reforming. Whatever it is, the education systems not only in East but also in some parts of west are based on social efficiency theory and students are conceived as to-be-workers. Self-actualization and intellectual development are not even in the secondary place.

as it is mentioned in the video, our educattion system also kill the creativity of the students and cause them to behave like robots.I think we loose huge amont of potential to produce artistic, scientific and tecnological productions.

The article states "Intelligent Tutoring Systems are not as effective as one-to-one human tutoring." The reason is that in one-to-one human tutoring a tutar is able to identify learners' affective state as well as their attention span. So, the article proposes the Mutimodal Intelligent Tutoring Systems (MITS), which provides information about learners' attention span and affective state.

This is an interesting study. I would be curious to read more about the multimodality of the ITSs, specifically how different type of interactions (audio, visual, etc.) have impact on learner's development. People in this area also started conducting research on "multimodal learning analytics".

In human-interaction, 55% of affective information is carried by the body whilst 38% by the voice tone and volume, and only 7% person by the words spoken [1]. Ekman [2] further suggests that non-verbal behaviours are the primary vehicles for expressing emotion. With the availability of computational power, and great advances in the fields of computer vision and speech recognition, it is now possible to create systems that can detect facial expressions, gestures and body postures from video and audio feed. Furthermore, systems that can integrate different modalities can offer powerful and much more pleasant computer experiences as they would be embracing users' natural behaviour.

In the paper it says "According to Wolcott teachers rely on nonverbal means such as eye contact, facial expressions and body language to determine the cognitive states of students, which indicate the degree of success in the instructional transaction". I really wonder what is your opinion about it and would it be succesful to implement affect recognition (after voice-recognition) in intelligent tutoring systems.

"Codecademy - Learn to code interactively, for free"

What makes a tutor intelligent? Its design to simulate a human tutor's behavior and guidance. Evrim Hocam I see your point:) but I think it's a basic intelligent system, isn't it?

Mustafa, I was just wondering how the literature on ITSs define "intelligence" in their context. What makes a system intelligent? Let's elaborate more on this in class.

It`s a short introduction of how teacher education is treated in Finland.it talks about the classroom environment they create, the goal of teacher education and the inservice training they provide after teachers get their Masters degree.

The compulsory and voluntary intense in-service trainings for all grade teacher as in Japan and Korea, is very critical I think. These training are very well structured focusing on different topics such as educational philosophies, relationships with parents or different instructional methods.

I agree with Canan. Because I know that Shanghai-China is the first country according to latest PISA results. Also, Shanghai's population is over 14,5 million. With this population they can have high achievement level in an international exam. I think the success is not related to population. This is only related to educational policies. Especially teachers quality have huge impact on countries success in such exams. Educational policies on teacher candidates' selection and education should be revised as soon as possible. As turkish idiom said: "Az olsun ve öz olsun-less number- higher quality"(I'm not sure about the translation, can English teacher friends help me that point?.). Goverment should select teacher as many as the country need.

Bu okulda öğrencileri okuldan soğutacak hiç bir uygulama yok. Özel okul statüsünde ancak kar amacı güdülmüyor. Bütçesi velilerin katılımıyla bir kooperatif tarafından karşılanıyor. İlk şubesi Bodrum'da açılan okulun ikinci şubesi için İzmir'de çalışmalar başlatıldı.

most probably you have heard that Summerhill School in England. It is a boarding school founded by A.S. Neill in 1921 and its basic principle is the school should be made to fit the child, rather than the child should be made to fit the school. I think the one in Turkey might be founded based on the Summerhill School. here is is website for more information; www.summerhillschool.co.uk

There is this point that I totally agree with Burcu about disadvantaged groups. Also whenever I think about examples like Sudbury Valley, I get impressed by the idea of getting rid of exam threat. But for our country, we have to change like everything, the belief systems, the culture, the attitudes. We have a lot do to in that respect, even if our main intention to make just a small change.

Naturally, there are some disadvantages of cognitive intelligent tutroring systems.

Thank you İbrahim, I think the con about distraction is very important (It requires more discipline, Your child would have to keep his focus on the screen without getting distracted by emails, IM's or Facebook.) Any ideas to prevent getting distracted?

For me it is important to be aware of that in foreign language instruction, the movement of your mouth can be really important in getting pronunciation right. That's harder to teach online. If the subject or homework assignment specifically requires the child to write on paper, it's much harder for an online tutor to read along with the student. So it works better for some subjects

ACM library has so many article, publications and resources on cognitive tutoring and intelligent tutoring systems. If you are interested, you can check more here. Also METU has the subscription to ACM.

It's an interesting article about Learning Management Systems from George Siemens originator of Connectivism Theory.

I am now convinced of the opportunities of learning that can be provided by games after reading the following quote: "While commercial video games often offer worlds in which players prepare for the actions of soldiers or thieves, the question arises as to whether other types of games could let players prepare for action from different perspectives or identities such as a particular type of scientist, political activist, or global citizen, for instance. "

Yelda, honestly, I also used to question the contribution of video games to learning and nowadays, as seeing more examples like the one you shared, I guess yes perspective are changing:) I believe as we also discussed in the forum, the most critical thing is how the material, video or something else is presented to the learners and used, not the material itself.

The same material in two differnt hands may serve to two differnt ideologies , beliefs, subject areas hence I do definitely agree with Canan the mentality of the minds who are using those plays the important role.

A center for cognitive tutor program. The definition from the website: "Our research focuses on the development of Cognitive Tutors -- instructional systems that support guided learning-by-doing. Drawing from the disciplines of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology and human computer interaction, we develop systems that provide individualized assistance to students as they work on challenging real-world problems in complex domains such as computer programming, algebra and geometry. Individualized guidance is made possible using detailed computational models of skills and misconceptions underlying a learning domain."

Pınar, I think Carnegie Learning "Success Stories" page does not provide the information whether the research group uses the tutoring system as additional or supportive on top of the control group's traditional lesson content. So if the research group only used the tutoring system then it is a significant result.

I think it was a supportive program because in the report it was stated that the Cognitive Tutor Algebra I curriculum consisted of classroom instruction, software sessions, and text. However, the information provided in the report is not sufficient to make an evaluation of the program, other variables might have influenced the results.

Mostly probably all of you are familiar with Dyned. It is an interactive software for learning English and it is a quite good innovation in the field of computer assisted language learning. It is tired to be used in the public schools and Turkish Ministry of Education supports this.

So perhaps, "motivation" is an important issue to consider with cognitive tutors. Let's cover some of the motivational aspects of cognitive tutors and intelligent tutoring systems in class.

I think when sts are first introduced with such programs, they display high motivation. They are eager to find the secrets of the program. However, as time passes and as they get used to the style of the program, their motivation decreases since there are no secrets anymore. Therefore, in my opinion, to keep their motivation at its highest level, each module (if it's modular) should introduce new ways of learning.

there is a conference on intelligent tutoring systems.

You've surely heard the slogans: "Our educational games will give your brain a workout!" Or how about, "Give your students the cognitive muscles they need to build brain fitness." And then there's the program that "builds, enhances, and restores natural neural pathways to assist natural learning."

Fischer's ideas are really interesting. I was most confused about his idea of left-right brained.

As far as I see, this link was shared in this group a long time ago, but I've wanted to make it visible again so that you don't miss it. This is the last post coming from me for this week :).