Learning Sciences

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.

An article about computerized tutoring (NYT 2012)

"Teacher gestured, pointed, made eye contact, modulated her voice." some of the missing elements in cognitive tutoring systems.

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".

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.

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.

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

It is about the development of intelligent tutors through military implementations.

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.

Here is a video showing how a tutor works

Ok, thank you :) I thought if a teacher is using this tool for example, s/he can enter some skills beforehand.

Thank you Halil, it's a very good example. And Canan mentioned a good point but I have a question: If we use these kind of systems, do we need empty tools for teachers which they can fill for their own instructional purposes or do we need a complete environment which teachers will just use?

This article is from Journal of Educational Psychology describing an advanced learning technology used to investigate hypotheses about learning by teaching. The proposed technology is an instance of a teachable agent, called SimStudent, that learns skills (e.g., for solving linear equations) from examples and from feedback on performance. SimStudent has been integrated into an online, gamelike environment in which students act as "tutors" and can interactively teach SimStudent by providing it with examples and feedback.

http://ehis.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=62560df9-81f0-48df-9217-73a31d3da977%40sessionmgr14&vid=3&hid=6 This is the direct link to the article.

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

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.

Ken Koedinger is a professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University. In this interview with ELI Director Malcolm Brown, Ken discusses intelligent tutoring.

One to one interaction is missing in intelligent tutoring, which Ken Koedinger accepts :)

Burcu, that does not mean ITS will never have the features for one to one interaction. This is a matter of time and technology. If u can read the article "Multimodal Affect Recognition in Intelligent Tutoring Systems" below ITSs have very rapid progress for interaction.

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."

LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables) is an inter-disciplinary research project at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a novel tool to improve literacy - an automated Reading Tutor that displays stories on a computer screen, and listens to children read aloud.

An easy SJT example for us.

Situational judgment tests:a review of recent research http://users.ugent.be/~flievens/sjtreview.pdf

I liked the assessment style here. Thanks..

Here there is a guideline for writing a literature review. And also you can find more sources about academic wiriting.

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?

I think Vitamin is one of the best cogntive tools in Turkish. They have very comprehensive work online.

I am not sure if Vitamin is tracing the learner development. I will try to ask it to one of my friends eırking at Vitamin.

I agree with Halil, Vitamin is like distance education programs of Anatolian University. It offers videos presenting he topic and tests of the related subjects. Learners do not take immediate feedback which lead to the individualized progress in the program.