Dynamic Support for Virtual Math Teams

免费在线学习有望改变美国的教育格局，为无法获得高质量私人辅导的低收入和少数族裔学生提供极大的补充教育机会，以补充他们的在校教育。建议的解决方案是在人手不足的虚拟数学团队(VMT)环境中开发可用人力支持的技术增强，并部署由自动检测到的对话事件触发的对话代理，这些代理能够引发有价值的协作行为，如反思、寻求帮助和提供帮助。该项目汇集了实验室和教室中技术开发和仔细实验的专业知识，大规模部署教育材料的记录，以及在协作环境中取得重大学生学习成果的坚实基础。该项目建立在试点项目成果的基础上，在该项目中，该小组建立了VMT-Basike，这是一个支持协作解决问题的技术基础设施，并在网上进行了试点研究，取得了令人振奋的结果。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一般开发，以帮助在需要协作支持的各种环境中进行协作。通过将教育环境和基于计算机的智能代理的研究结合在一起，该项目在计算机科学和数学教育中都具有潜在的变革意义。该项目有可能将数学带入全国社区，因为这些代理的开发将大大减少人类必须监控VMT协作的时间。VMT主要在教室外操作，作为学生学习数学的补充工作。此外，由于这些代理提供的协作支持不是专门针对数学问题解决的，因此代理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.