Toby Dragon

Ithaca College | IC · Department of Computer Science

This paper extends a previous publication describing a system that utilizes a wide variety of available assessment information to automatically analyze students’ understanding at a conceptual level and offer relevant automated support to teachers and students. This organization and support can be at the course level or at the level of curriculum fo...

Collaborative learning can be beneficial for students, but its success is highly dependent on the characteristics of the students grouped together. Structuring group interactions enhances the effectiveness of collaborative learning [1] and therefore the structuring must be done appropriately. Creating successful groups is challenging for instructor...

This lightning talk describes our current effort to create a system that helps teachers organize the content of their computer science courses while simultaneously providing a basis for intelligent support. This work blends the disciplines of computer science education, artificial intelligence in education, and instructional design to create a holi...

Undergraduate teaching assistants have been used in many classes, over many years, and at many institutions. The literature primarily focuses on the practice in a university environment with large classes. We focus instead on the use of undergraduate teaching assistants in the small college, small class environment. We have been employing students...

Hand-drawn memory diagrams are frequently used in computer science to demonstrate new programming concepts and support students' understanding of program functionality. These diagrams often vary among courses, instructors, and languages, which confuse students moving through the curriculum. Consistent memory diagrams throughout a curriculum not onl...

In this paper, we identify Learning to Learn Together (L2L2) as a new and important educational goal. Our view of L2L2 is a substantial extension of Learning to Learn (L2L): L2L2 consists of learning to collaborate to successfully face L2L challenges. It is inseparable from L2L, as it emerges when individuals face problems that are too difficult fo...

This article describes efforts to offer automated assessment of students within an exploratory learning environment. We present a regression model that estimates student assessments in an ill-defined medical diagnosis tutor called Rashi. We were pleased to find that basic features of a student’s solution predicted expert assessment well, particular...

This paper presents Metafora, both a platform for integrated tools as well as an emerging pedagogy for supporting Learning to Learn Together in science and mathematics education. Our goal is to design technology that brings education to a higher level; a level where students not only learn subject matter, but also gain a set of critical skills need...

Social networking services (SNS), such as Facebook, are an increasingly important platform for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL). However, little is known about whether and how academic opinion change and argumentative knowledge construction (AKC) can be facilitated in SNS. Existing argumentation practice in informal SNS discussions...

Learning to learn together (L2L2) is a complex competence requiring that all the group members are able to coordinate, regulate and plan the learning task by balancing issues of individual ability, motivation and expectations through constant dialogue. In this paper we report on a project to define the complex competence of L2L2 and to support it w...

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) has been demonstrated to improve student interaction in complex collaborative learning scenarios. When orchestrated appropriately, it also provides opportunities for learning high-level social learning skills, or "learning to learn together" (L2L2), but these opportunities are often only dealt with i...

Collaboration in complex learning scenarios does not succeed automatically without structuring the learning process. The Metafora project (http://www.metfora-project.org) is designing a pedagogy and a platform of web-based software to support learning to learn together (L2L2) in the context of math and science. The platform serves both as a toolbox...

Students use Facebook to organize their classroom experiences [1], but hardly to share and form opinions on subject matters. We explore the benefits of argument diagrams for the formation of scientific opinion on behaviorism in Facebook. We aim at raising awareness of opinion conflict and structuring the argumentation with scripts [2]. A lab study...

This demonstration will highlight the pedagogy and functionality of the Metafora system as developed by the end of the second year of the EU-funded (ICT-257872) project. The Metafora system expands the teaching focus beyond domain-specific learning to enable the development of 21st century collaborative competencies necessary to learn in today's co...

Expert knowledge bases are effective tools for providing a domain model from which intelligent, individualized support can be offered. This is even true for noisy data such as that gathered from activities involving ill-defined domains and collaboration. We attempt to automatically detect the subject of free-text collaborative input by matching stu...

This paper presents our research efforts to support students' collaborative process when learning mathematics and science as they interact with microworlds and engage in discussions and structured arguments. The system provides students with an environment to explore challenging problems and encourages them to collaborate using a discussion tool to...

This paper describes efforts to both promote and recognize student dialogue in free-entry text discussion within an inquiry-learning environment. First, we discuss collaborative tools that enable students to work together and how these tools can potentially focus student effort on subject matter. We then show how our tutor uses an expert knowledge...

This demonstration will show how a tutor can detect the content of collaborative behavior and offer relevant domain level interventions. Rashi is a domain independent intelligent tutor providing students with practice using inquiry skills. When working on human biology, students interact with a virtual sick patient whom they must successfully diagn...

This paper describes the use of wireless sensors to recognize student emotion and the use of pedagogical agents to respond to students with these emotions. Minimally invasive sensor technology has reached such a maturity level that students engaged in classroom work can us sensors while using a computer-based tutor. The sensors, located on each of...

Theories and technologies are needed to understand and integrate the knowledge of student affect (e.g., frustration, motivation and self-confidence) into learning models. Our goals are to redress the cognitive versus affective imbalance in teaching systems, develop tools that model student affect and build tutors that elicit, measure and respond to...

This research seeks to improve learning by integrating intelligent coaching with peer-to-peer collaboration. We combine advanced technologies that support student freedom and exploration, allow for collaboration and peer tutoring, and provide task advice by modeling student work and behavior. We empirically evaluated both the effect of added collab...

We describe technology to dynamically collect information about students' emotional state, including human observation and real-time multi- modal sensors. Our goal is to identify physical behaviors that are linked to emotional states, and then identify how these emotional states are linked to student learning. This involves quantitative field obser...

We evaluated the impact of a set of interventions to repair students' disengagement while solving geometry problems in a tutoring system. We present a deep analysis of how a tutor can remediate a student's disengagement and motivation with self-monitoring feedback. The analysis consists of a between-subjects analyses on students learning and on stu...

We present an overview of tutoring systems that teach by using the inquiry learning method and discuss a domain-independent tutor that supports critical thinking in four domains. The Rashi inquiry tutor provides structure and coaching comments in both science and art history topics. Students receive feedback about their arguments as they sort, filt...

We describe a portable coaching environment used within a domain-independent inquiry-learning infrastructure. This coach reasons about a student's knowledge and offers pertinent, domain-specific feedback. It promotes good inquiry behavior by critiquing the student's hypotheses and supporting data and relationships among propositions. Four inquiry t...

The Rashi inquiry learning environment for human biology was evaluated using a new instrument for assessing gains in scientific inquiry skills. The instrument was designed to be sensitive to the small pre-post skill gains that are hypothesized for short learning interventions. It is also designed to be scored with less effort than the verbal protoc...

We have developed a range of critical thinking environments for science education that span several academic content areas, including human biology, geology and forestry. All environments share a methodology, infrastructure and sets of assumptions and tools, which allows them to leverage from the accomplishments and intuitions of the others. These...

Animated program visualization can be used to support innovative instructional methods for teaching beginners about objects, their behavior, and state. In this paper, we present a discussion of methods that define object behavior and character (class)-level state variables that track state changes for 3D animated objects in small virtual worlds. We...

Animated program visualization can be used to support innovative instructional methods for teaching beginners about objects, their behavior, and state. In this paper, we present a discussion of methods that define object behavior and character (class)-level state variables that track state changes for 3D animated objects in small virtual worlds. We...

We developed tutors to support critical thinking in four ill-defined domains. Students work with science or art history tutors and receive feedback about their arguments as they sort, filter and categorize data. A coach provides guidance using a set of expert rules and an expert knowledge base, which creates the basis for the content-specific analy...

This paper presents the design of forthcoming wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) studies in the context of the EU-funded Metafora project that is developing a Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) system to scaffold 12 to 16-year-old students in learning to learn together (L2L2). In the Metafora system, students undertake lengthy collaborative challenge...

This paper presents our approach in combining analysis across a combination of learning tools to provide both in-tool and cross-tool sup-port. The paper uses as a case study a scenario where students undertake an activity in a microworld and are encouraged to collaborate using a discussion and argumentation environment. Several technical challenges...