Scaffolding pedagogical discourse in engineering courses: Innovation and impact

跨学科（99）这个项目是设计，部署和评估软件工具，自动结构和脚手架本科生在网上讨论板的互动。基于对存档的学生对以前讨论主题的贡献的分析，软件工具推荐那些对目前参与同一主题讨论的本科生有用、相关或感兴趣的贡献。正在开发丰富的评估技术来分析讨论，这些技术基于PI团队正在创建的课程本体和课程语料库。使用的提问策略包括提出问题和评论，邀请参与讨论，以及澄清注释。此外，学生的兴趣或专业知识简介有助于将个别学生与其他学生联系起来。评估研究的重点是不同的支架干预对学生成绩，STEM兴趣和保留率的影响。该项目的智力价值在于两个方面：1）评估协作和反思功能如何影响STEM本科学生的表现和学生对科学和工程的兴趣; 2）开发自动脚手架和评估学生贡献的创新技术。该项目的潜力，更广泛的影响来自其支持同行学习，反思和协作解决问题。这些属性提高了学生的参与度和表现，并可以加深不受入学限制的课堂环境中广泛和数量的学生的概念理解，因为它们是网络交付的。

Interdisciplinary (99) This project is designing, deploying, and evaluating software tools that automatically structure and scaffold undergraduate student interactions within online discussion boards. Based on analysis of archived student contributions to previous discussion topics the software tools recommend those contributions that are useful, relevant or of interest to undergraduates currently participating in discussions of the same topic. Rich assessment techniques are being developed to analyze discussions, and these are based on course ontologies and course corpora that the PI team is creating. Tutorial strategies used include generation of questions and comments, invitations to participate in discussions, and clarifying annotations. Furthermore, student profiles of interest or expertise help link individual students to one another on particular topics. Evaluation studies focus on the effects of different scaffolding interventions on student performance, STEM interest, and retention rates. The intellectual merit of the project lies in two areas: 1) the assessment of how the collaboration and reflection features impact STEM undergraduate student performance and student interest in science and engineering; and 2) the development of innovative technologies for automatic scaffolding and assessment of student contributions. The project's potential for broader impacts derives from its support for peer learning, reflection, and collaborative problem solving. These attributes increase student engagement and performance and can deepen conceptual understanding across a wide range and number of students in classroom settings that are not constrained by enrollment, since they are web delivered.