Dynamic Support for Virtual Math Teams

免费在线学习有望改变美国的教育格局，因为它大大扩大了那些无法获得高质量私人辅导以补充在校教育的低收入和少数民族学生的补充教育机会。建议的解决方案是开发一种技术增强，以在人员配备较少的虚拟数学团队（VMT）环境中提供人力支持，以及部署由自动检测到的会话事件触发的会话代理，并能够引发有价值的协作行为，如反射，寻求帮助和提供帮助。该项目汇集了技术开发的专业知识和在实验室和课堂上的仔细实验，大规模部署教育材料的跟踪记录，以及在协作环境中显著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，在该项目中，该小组建立了VMT-Basilica，这是一个支持协作解决问题的技术基础设施，并在网上进行了试点研究，取得了可喜的成果。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发展，以帮助在各种各样的设置需要协作支持的协作。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方面具有潜在的变革性。该项目有可能将数学带到一个国家社区，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。VMTs主要在课堂外运作，并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特定的数学问题的解决，代理支持的协作可以扩展到任何领域的协作需要得到支持-从教育到商业的军事。

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.