Dynamic Support for Virtual Math Teams

免费的在线学习有望改变美国的教育格局，因为它为低收入和少数民族学生提供了大量的补充教育机会，这些学生无法获得高质量的私人辅导来补充他们的在校教育。建议的解决方案是开发一种技术增强，以在人手较少的虚拟数学团队（VMT）环境中提供可用的人力支持，同时部署由自动检测到的会话事件触发的会话代理，并具有引发有价值的协作行为（如反思、寻求帮助和提供帮助）的能力。该项目汇集了技术开发方面的专业知识，以及实验室和课堂上的精心实验，大规模部署教育材料的记录，以及在协作环境中取得重要学生学习成果的坚实基础。该项目以一个试点项目的成果为基础，在该试点项目中，团队建立了VMT-Basilica，这是一个支持协作解决问题的技术基础设施，并在在线环境中进行了试点研究，取得了有希望的结果。vmt使用数学论坛提供的基础设施。该项目还有助于智能代理的总体开发，以帮助在各种需要协作支持的环境中进行协作。通过将教育环境和基于计算机的智能代理的研究结合起来，该项目在计算机科学和数学教育方面都有潜在的变革意义。该项目有可能将数学引入全国社区，因为这些代理的开发将大大减少人类必须监控VMT合作的时间。vmt主要在课堂之外运作，作为学生学习数学的补充工作。此外，由于这些智能体提供的协作支持并不局限于数学问题的解决，因此智能体支持的协作可以扩展到任何需要支持协作的领域——从教育到商业再到军事。

Free on-line learning promises to transform the educational landscape of the United States through a significant broadening of supplemental educational opportunities for low income and minority students who do not have access to high quality private tutoring to supplement their in school education. The proposed solution is to develop a technological augmentation to available human support in a lightly staffed Virtual Math Teams (VMT) environment as well as deploying conversational agents that are triggered by automatically detected conversational events and that have the ability to elicit valuable collaborative behavior such as reflection, help seeking, and help provision. This project brings together expertise in technological development and careful experimentation both in the lab and in the classroom, a track record for large scale deployment of educational materials, and a solid foundation in significant student learning results in collaborative environments. The project builds on results from a pilot project in which the team has built VMT-Basilica, which is a technical infrastructure for supporting collaborative problem solving, as well as having conducted pilot studies with it in an on-line setting with promising results. The VMTs use the infrastructure provided by the Math Forum. This project also contributes to the general development of intelligent agents to aid collaboration in a wide variety of settings where collaboration support is needed. By bringing together research in education environments and in computer based intelligent agents, this project is potentially transformative in both computer science and mathematics education. The project has the potential to bring mathematics to a national community since the development of these agents will substantially reduce the amount of time a human must monitor VMT collaborations. VMTs operate primarily out of the classroom and act as supplemental work for students learning mathematics. In addition, since the collaboration support provided by these agents is not specific to mathematics problem solving, agent supported collaboration could be expanded to any field where collaboration needs to be supported - from education to business to the military.