EXP: Improving Student Help-Giving with Ubiquitous Collaboration Support Technology

学生从帮助同龄人中受益：由于试图向他人解释该领域，助助者提高了他们对该领域的知识，他们对自己解决问题的能力变得更有信心。然而，学生需要指导才能成功地给予帮助。这项研究探索了学生在学习活动之间移动时如何帮助他们的同龄人。它还探索了个性化学习技术的发展，为学生提供个性化的支持，以提高他们在各种活动中提供帮助的技能。传统的个性化学习技术一直是“单一服务的”，因为它们是为特定的活动而构建的，没有利用学生在该领域的其他经验。这种单一服务的方法错失了获得学生整体能力的机会，并自适应地跟踪学生在学习中的成长。该项目将开发一种名为普适协作支持(UbiCoS)的新技术，它可以自适应地支持同一学生在不同的学习工具中提供帮助。UbiCoS被应用于三个8年级数学活动的同伴帮助。第一个是一个与数字教科书相结合的论坛，学生们在这里回答同学提出的问题。第二个是在线问答论坛，学生们可以在这里回答世界各地其他学生发布的问题。第三种是可教的代理系统，学生向虚拟代理解释数学概念。提高对技术如何促进帮助互动的理解可以改善中学数学课堂中同伴帮助活动的设计和支持，这将直接影响领域学习、帮助技能和动机。这个项目探索了通过在中学经历中培养帮助话语来扩大人们对STEM的兴趣的方法。该提案有可能直接影响300多名参与UbiCoS评估和迭代开发的学生，并创建数字工具，吸引传统上在STEM中代表性不足的学习者。该项目设计了有关个别学生在活动中提供帮助的模式的知识，并将其整合到个性化协作支持的标准组件中，包括对学生交互、专家和学生模型的自动解释，以及支持模块。UbiCoS将分三个阶段迭代开发和评估。第一个是让学生参加研讨会，以帮助设计给予帮助的支持。第二阶段进行设计研究，以提高对适应性支持的时间和内容、学生给予帮助行为以及认知和动机过程之间的关系的理解。最后，第三阶段包括一项对照研究，以评估支持对学生结果的影响。这些用户研究的结果将促进对教学框架的理解，该框架描述了适应性帮助支持应如何考虑认知、动机和课堂因素，因为这些因素与学生以前的经验有关。这项研究将UbiCoS确立为一种新的教育技术类型，可以支持跨不同学习活动的整体协作。

Students benefit from helping their peers: Help-givers improve their knowledge of the domain as a result of trying to explain it to others, and they become more confident in their abilities to solve problems. However, students need guidance to be successful at giving help. This research explores how students give help to their peers as they move between learning activities. It also explores the development of personalized learning technologies to provide students with individualized support that improves their help-giving skills across activities. Traditional personalized learning technologies have been "single-serving," in that they are built for a particular activity and do not leverage a student's other experiences with the domain. This single-serving approach misses the opportunity to gain a holistic perspective of a student's ability and adaptively track a student's growth in learning. This project will develop a new technology, called Ubiquitous Collaboration Support (UbiCoS), that can adaptively support the same student in giving help across different learning tools. UbiCoS is applied to peer help across three 8th grade mathematics activities. The first is a discussion forum integrated with a digital textbook where students answer questions posed by their classmates. The second is an online Q&A forum where students go to answer questions posted by other students around the world. The third is a teachable agent system where students explain mathematics concepts to a virtual agent. Enhanced understanding of how technology can facilitate help-giving interactions could improve how peer help activities are designed and supported in middle school mathematics classrooms, which would directly impact domain learning, help-giving skills, and motivation. This project explores ways to broaden interest in STEM by fostering help-giving discourse in middle school experiences. The proposal has the potential to directly impact over 300 students engaged in the evaluation and iterative development of UbiCoS and create digital tools that engage learners that are traditionally underrepresented in STEM. This project designs and incorporates knowledge about the individual student's pattern of help-giving actions across activities into standard components of personalized collaboration support including automatic interpretation of student interaction, expert and student models, and a support module. UbiCoS will be iteratively developed and evaluated in three phases. The first engages students in workshops to aid in the design of the help-giving support. The second phase conducts design studies to improve understanding of the relationship between the timing and content of adaptive support, student help-giving behaviors, and cognitive and motivational processes. Finally, the third phase consists of a controlled study to evaluate the impact of the support on student outcomes. The results of these user studies will advance understanding of an instructional framework describing the ways adaptive help-giving support should account for cognitive, motivational, and classroom factors as they relate to a student's prior experiences. This research establishes UbiCoS as a new genre of educational technology that can support collaboration in a holistic manner, across different learning activities.