He took his first Cog Sci class (on problem solving) from Jim Greeno who he called his mentor. He has been studying problem solving for most of his career.

He took a job at UCSB out of grad school and has been there for the past 28 years. It has been a good environment for doing his research.

The lineage of his research is:

1. Advance organizers
2. How illustrations (pictures) can portray analogies and metaphors which can help facilitate problem solving
3. Animations

While there are many guidelines out there for how to design instruction, most guidelines are not based on evidence or theory. He is attempting to discover multimedia design principles that are theory and research based.

He showed a diagram depicting the information processing model of cognition. Perception, sense making, and integration.

Me: This makes me think about what a theory behavior and cognition is. At a minimum, it is an explanation for how people function. It seems like useful theories can be used to make testable predictions.

A technology-centered approach contrasts heavily with a learner-centered approach. We should first try to understand how people learn before we try to figure out how to design instruction for them.

He makes a distinction between two main kinds of learning outcomes:
-remembering (recall)
-understanding (transfer)

Me: Of course, what constitutes new situations? What constitutes transfer? It is easy to differentiate between recall and application, but not so easy to determine the degree or distance of transfer? That assumes that there is some way to quantify or measure the elements of knowledge.

The level of cognitive activity determines level of meaningful learning.

Me: What about phsychomotor learning?

Activities that do not involve interaction do not support learning.

What makes an activity meaningful?

A lack of explanations and opportunities to question why may be one cause.

Does adding pictures to text-based instruction increase learning?

It can.

Example: Lightning lesson

• retention test: write down all you remember
• transfer tests:
  • redisgn
  • troubleshoot
  • predict

Two versions (a) paper based, (b)computer based (with animation and voice over)

Text plus pictures was better than text alone. Text plus animation was better than text alone.

Redesign: How could you make it more effective?
Troubleshooting: If you did x, and it didn’t work, what might have gone wrong?
Explanation: Why does x?

Has also worked with instructional games and simulations

Assumptions of cognitive theory:

1. Dual channels – humans have separate channels for processing visual and auditory information
2. Limited capacity – William James – humans can only process so much information at one time
3. Active processing – meaningful learning occurs when people are actively involved: (a) selecting/attending – paying attention, (b) organizing – into a coherent representation that makes sense to you, (c) integrating – relate the new information to your existing knowledge

How can you foster integration given that people have limited working memory?

What about tool use and using the environment as cues to remembering and solving?

Research questions:

Multimedia Effect
-Does adding a graphic (to text) help? – Text alone vs. together Yes: great improvement in transfer test (multimedia effect) – graphic voice over was better than text

Contiquity Effect
-What makes a good graphic? separated vs. contiguous A: Integrated with text works better – locate text close to relative portions of images
(spatial or temporal contiguity effect)

Coherence Effect

Sometimes it is better to present less information than more. Seductive details – interesting but not related information (does it motive them more and make them more interested)
-Adding those details has a big negative effect on people’s transfer ability
-Adding background music depresses
-Reading summaries produced more learning than reading whole lessons
-Extraneous information gets in the way of making connections

Modality Effect
-People do much better when the words are spoken rather than printed
-When you present them in textual form it overloads the visual system. Presenting them auditorily offloads the processing to the auditory system
-Graphics and narration and text results in less learning than just graphics and

Personalization effect – conversational results in more learning than formal presentation

Pacing effect -

Signaling effect

Individual differences – low knowledge learners need better

Theory and research based

Clark & Mayer (2003) E-learning and the science of instruction

Mayer (2003) Learning and instruction.

Analysis of graphics in CA text books. Over 50% of the space was devoted to graphics. About of the 85% of the graphics were not instructional

Barbara White – Learning Physics in a game environment – learned better when asked to reflect afterwards

Games
Design a plant – that will live on another planet (for a environment
Dr. Fizz – Electromagnet
-modality and interactivity effects observed

-Motivational? Does adding a game aspect to instruction help learners persist longer?

Progression of mental models

Me: What about the component fluency hypothesis? He agreed that some things need to be automated to free up cognitive resources for conceptual processing

Future research interests:
-games and simulations (because of how motivating they appear to be to children)
-individual differences – cognitive style (verbal, auditory)
-online pedagogical agents (because they are forecasted to be the guide on the side in the future)
-What kinds of questions do people ask a tutor (when learning SPSS)?
-What kinds of answers do tutors give?
-Theory of tutoring?

Pavio & Battely – dual channel effect

What would a theory based on cognitive principles be like for:
-Tool use?
-Tool use instruction?
-Tool design?

Of course, like life is, I’m not any less busy now that I’ve defended. The only difference is that I now have 8 projects all more or less equally competing for my time instead of having one obvious first priority.

I think a careful look at how technology could change the role of the teacher would alleviate these fears and in fact excite teachers. I have teachers responsd to Saxon and similar heavily scripted curriculums by saying that it turns them into a robot. Some teachers react to to scripted online instruction in similar ways.

Technology contrasts heavily with this. I believe that a major opportunity that technology offers is to allow us to deliver mastery learning (teach students where they are at and don’t move on until they do) in a way that also encourages understanding as opposed to rote learning of facts and procedures.

My perception is that direct instruction approaches to mastery learning try to narrow the gaps between learners, but often results in rote learning (and higher test scores by the way). Side note: I take it for granted that understanding is much harder to measure than recall and for that reason we assess recall and results based learning (NCLB) values instructional methods that produce it.

I believe technology offers an alternative to trying to homogenizing all learners, it can help teachers manage the logistical chaos of trying to let large numbers of learners go at their own pace. The role change I see of teachers is from dispenser of information to diagnoser of student understanding and customizer of instruction. To me this does not denigrate or demean the teacher, rather it seems to be immensely freeing. It allows you to be a fellow sojourner for understanding. I’d be interested to hear the opinions of lots of teachers on this? I’m sure one reaction, is yeah, that should great but it is pie in the sky.

Then there is Elliot Solaway’s statement I’ve heard him make on one more than occasion “I tried so long to figure out how to make computers smarter, then one day I realized, its not the computers that we should try to make smarter, its the students, so that is what I’ve tried to focus on since.” Both of these resonate with the theme of the Social Life of Information by JSB that I’m currently reading.
I ran across Quantum Simulations intelligent tutoring systems again today. I’ve looked at it briefly before and will look at it again. I have been a student of the ITS literature and attended the CIRCLE Summer School a couple of years ago. I taught a semester of College Algebra here at USU using Carnegie Learning’s Quantitative Literacy Tutor. My masters project involved in the creation of an ITS for teaching solving systems of simultaneous linear equations (I’ll post a link to it tomorrow). I also created an expert system as part of some research on feedback that I conducted with Dr. Gibbons. One of the five dissertation proposals I put together focused on problem sequencing. To prepare for that project I conducted an extensive review of the literature on problem sequencing including ITS research (I’ll post that too).

So what does ITS have to offer? From my reading:

• Methods for analyzing human performance that are perhaps more rigorous than those typically offered by the field of ID.
• User interfaces that allow performances to be carried out in non-linear sequences as opposed to the strictly sequential sequences typically found in most CBT.
• Ways to interpret more complex types of student input than typical CBT.
• Methods for dynamically sequencing instruction or problems.

• Repetition
• Visualization
• Procedures for generating the answers
• Counting by __ (for multiplication)
• Using reference values

If anyone has other strategies or pointers to online resources that are good examples of these strategies to teach basic math facts, please share.

The most common strategy it seems is recall by drilling and killing like in my boy’s school. One effective way to do this is by using flash cards. The Surfnetkids homework help newsletter lead me to their math facts flashcards page. The problem with most flash cards is that they don’t teach any alternative besides recall. It seems like flash cards could be created that taught alternate strategies.

Wes’s Presentation
Wes gave a helpful overview of the main services of the MathForum. While I have visited there periodically it is so big that it is hard to get my mind wrapped around all that is there. Perhaps the most interesting things to me are the Problem of the Week (POW) online mentoring.

One of the challenges they are currently facing is sustainablity. They have mentors who respond to student responses to problems of the week. Because they recieve 300+ responses each week, they need a way to reduce the cost of doing so. Approaches to this that they are considering include: (1) Enlist University Professors and others to respond on a voluntary basis, (2) Start charging for the service. Data from a recent survey they conducted indicates that ~30% of teachers and students even care about the moderating. Another option I discussed with him is to try to automate some of the work. I proposed the following process:

1. Analyze past student responses to see what the degree of clustering of response types is.
2. If there is sufficient clustering, perhaps the work could be divided into two tasks, first sorting student responses, and then writing a response for each of class of responses.

Anderson and Koedinger’s research on feedback is that diagnosing errors in detail and giving detailed customized remediation based on the type of error is not nearly as important as getting learners back on the right track. Of course a lot of this research comes from studies of immediate feedback which, it doesn’t appear that PoW mentoring is. Something to consider anyway.

He presented briefly on the Math Tools DL. He gave the vision that they hoped to utilize what they have learned from the somewhat naturalistic evolution of the Math Forum to apply to the development of this new resource.

I also discussed with Wes the possibility of analyzing some of the NLVM log files to contribute to a characterization of different types of online communities. Here are some hypotheses I would like to test in regard to that:

• Sessions that last ~30-45 minutes are more likely to be from classrooms then sessions of different lengths.
• Multiple IP addresses from the same domain are likely from a given class.
• If students in a class access many different resources in the NLVM, they are likely “playing”. The teacher’s use of the NLVM is not for the purpose of supporting specific learning outcomes.
• In contrast, students all accessing the same small set of resources, is likely targeted use.
• Repeat usage can be gauged by looking at repeat visits of same domain over time.

My guess is that there is a lot of playing going on. We would like to increase the amount of purposeful use. This will likely increase when objective focused sets of activities are made available. Currently the library is what I like to call mathlet centered as opposed to objective centered. So far, using TADRIOLA I have created a few lessons that are objective centered.

One interesting hypothesis that Wes shared is that being busy is part of what it means to be a teacher. It is part of their identity. It is also a way of being comfortably secure. When a teacher is busy, life is hectic, but at least they can deal with it. When you ask them to do something new, and they respond that they cannot because they are busy, that may be a way of saying, I’m comfortable doing what I’m doing, I don’t want to try something new. That is not to denigrate the fact that teachers are in fact busy. There is lots of data to show that. Wes pointed out that despite their business, never has a teacher turned him down when he asked them if they would spend an hour with him to do an interview. My experience has been similar. In general, teachers have been very gracious to spend time with me.

I talked with Wes about analyzing the qualitative data that I gathered. He indicated that in a similar analysis he conducted a few years ago, he found teacher types that characterized teachers according to their skill and comfortability level using technology. He found that technical skill was highly correlated with pedagogical expertise. I’m guessing that my data doesn’t exactly bear that out.

I told him of my guess that while many of the teachers that I worked with indicated interest, I doubted that many would follow up. I hope that I am wrong. He responded, that with the sample size I had (~80), he expected that there would be only 1 or 2 among them who would take the initiative to lead out in innovating with the technology.

Sanne’s Presentation (PPT)

The main thing I got out of Sanne’s presentation related to problem representation. He talked about how a problem is represented, or how a person represents to themselves has a major effect on how effectively and efficiently they can solve it. This ties in heavily to what we have been doing on the NLVM. Providing visual, dyamic, and interactive representations of problems that make them easier to conceptualize and solve. Good representations obscure details that are not needed to make decisions and accentuate details that are important for solving the problem.

Dr. Merrill’s Presentation

As usual, Dr. Merrill’s presentation was passionate and thought provoking. He pushed for theory building and empirical validation. I am all for that, however, there are questions other than will students learn from this? that are important, such as will teachers use this? will students use this?