Learning Sciences

This is a website explaining ACT-R theory with examples. You can reach software and tutorials and find more references.

The publications link of this website is very beneficial I think, the topics are very well organized and there are examples of many publications.

We will cover this reading in the following weeks in class. It talks about some of the urban legends on "learning styles", "digital natives" and "self-educators". Let me know what you think. Do you think they are myths?

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.

The slides are said to be adapted from Kenneth Koedinger's presentation. Sldies summarizing some principles and examples for us.

You can take a look (a free version for teachers and parents)

This tutor provides only practice opportunities for students but I am not sure that whether it includes problem solving context

I reallu like this application. Students can learn both geometri and how they can draw their way not to crash some objects. But The sam question came my mindwith Filiz, is this develop higher order thinking skills?

An application of the cognitive tutoring system.

I checked this software and it is really interactive and feedbacks are meaningfull. I also like the idea of Skillometer where students can follow their process and realize where they stand in spesific content.

Tihs video presents a brief explanation of Cognitive load theory that we mentioned in last week. I hope you like it.

I liked the definition of expertise as "acquisition of schemas" or mental structure. We talked about these in our discussion through organization of knowledge and chunking.

This is a research conducted on the possible replacement of teachers by intelligent tutors. Some interesting results are; rather than replacing the teacher, the tutor provided an additional resource for students and using the tutors allowed teachers to provide more individualized help.

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".

Here is the website which has the full report on Carnegie Learning Curricula and Cognitive Tutor.

Online math practice problems offer hints and integrated Step-by-step solutions. Prefer pen and paper? Generate a printable worksheet for study sessions and quizzes. (After registration, you can try it for 7 days)

This is what I like most! Hints are useful and i could decide the level also. Thanks for sharing.

thanks for sharing, wish it was more than 7 days :)

Today Filiz and I had a chance to the attend the Mendeley meeting of library. I am really glad to meet with Mendeley :) I think it will be very helpful for my future studies. Also I have a message for you from library. Until January we have the oppotunity of using institutional version of Mendeley which is more functional than the standard one. If the number of users is sufficient our library may consider prolonging the subscription. In order to use the institutional version of Mendeley you should subscribe with your metu mail adress and when you sign up you have to find the METU group and join it.

Great!!! We will have two library specialists this week in class to talk about library resources and software. We can explore Mendeley together as a group. As far as I remember we can create an online shared resource repository in Mendeley.

I'm really cruious about Mendeley. Please help me to be familiar with it.

When I was 1 st year undergraduate student in METU, We were using this online platform at my physic's course. Generally there were 10 problems assigned with sub-layers. It was offering rapid feedback, simulations and we were also graded.

Mustafa, It was really helpful from some aspects but I remember that I was frequently complaining about the software. It gave a chance to practice a lot what I had learnt previous class. It was good to have problems in a large scale of complexity ( from easiest to hardest). And sometimes questions were picturized and there were graphs etc. Mostly, they were for real life situations. We were trying to solve problems which we come face to face everyday.However, there were also drawbacks, for example the answers arranged in a way that they do not accept any other solution computer offers.Our answers had to be exactly same from decimals to points. This could sometimes let a disoppointment and robbed my motivation down.And there were fear of getting bad marks because in the and of the homework we were graded by our performance. All in all, despite its drawbacks, 7 years ago it was nice to have this different kind of method in our classess.

Thank you Ceren for sharing your experiences, you underlined very important points especially the one about answers.

"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.

The construct of motivation which we all like as a class:) is for sure critical in tech-based environments. This issue that sometimes go unnoticed is underlined in this paper focusing on Intelligent Tutoring Systems.