Designing for metacognition—applying cognitive tutor principles to the tutoring of help seeking

Intelligent Tutoring Systems have been shown to be very effective in supporting learning in domains such as mathematics, physics, computer programming, etc. However, they are yet to achieve similar success in tutoring metacognition. While an increasing number of educational technology systems support productive metacognitive behavior within the scope of the system, few attempt to teach skills students need to become better future learners. To that end, we offer a set of empirically-based design principles for metacognitive tutoring. Our starting point is a set of design principles put forward by Anderson et al. (Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4:167–207, 1995) regarding Cognitive Tutors, a family of Intelligent Tutoring Systems. We evaluate the relevance of these principles to the tutoring of help-seeking skills, based on our ongoing empirical work with the Help Tutor. This auxiliary tutor agent is designed to help students learn to make effective use of the help facilities offered by a Cognitive Tutor. While most of Anderson’s principles are relevant to the tutoring of help seeking, a number of differences emerge as a result of the nature of metacognitive knowledge and of the need to combine metacognitive and domain-level tutoring. We compare our approach to other metacognitive tutoring systems, and, where appropriate, propose new guidelines to promote the discussion regarding the nature and design of metacognitive tutoring within scaffolded problem-solving environments.     

The social geography of childcare: making up a middle‐class child

Childcare is a condensate of disparate social forces and social processes. It is gendered and classed. It is subject to an excess of policy and political discourse. It is increasingly a focus for commercial exploitation. This is a paper reporting on work in progress in an ESRC funded research project (R000239232) on the choice and provision of pre‐school childcare by middle‐class (service class) families in two contrasting London locations. Drawing on recent work in class analysis the paper examines the relationships between childcare choice, middle‐class fractions and locality. It suggests that on the evidence of the findings to date, there is some evidence of systematic differences between fractions in terms of values, perspectives and preferences for childcare, but a more powerful case for intra‐class similarities, particularly when it comes to putting preferences into practice in the ‘making up of a middle‐class child’ through care and education.     

Dyadic activities and attention in the infant: A developmental study

Infants’ abilities to focus attention on objects are known to be related to mothers’ mobilizing behaviors. As delayed effects of maternal behaviors at 5 months may be observed in 8-month-olds, mothers may be considered as scaffolding their infant’s attention. However, all dyadic activities are probably not equally propitious to attention mobilizing. In a sample of 30 dyads, studied at 5 and 8 months of age, whole observations were split in four broad categories: care, dyadic play with objects, dyadic play without objects and infant alone. The duration of maternal mobilizing and infant attention focussing were studied within categories. Inter-dyads variability is high, while dyads are stable across ages. Even within the dyadic play with objects, mothers differ widely in the duration and way they mobilize attention. Five-month-olds still need their mother’s support, as they explore less when they are alone, while 8-month-olds are more autonomous. The impact and importance of the various types of dyadic activities on cognitive development are discussed.     

The effects of virtual human gesture frequency and reduced video speed on satisfaction and learning outcomes

Educational technology research and development - Educators use various strategies to increase listening comprehension for nonnative English speakers in the classroom and multimedia environments....     

Critical role of leadership in nurturing a knowledge-supporting culture

This paper addresses the critical role leadership plays in the implementation and facilitation of knowledge management activities. Leadership is particularly important for organizations willing to ‘evolve’ their culture to a knowledge-supporting culture. Organizational culture has been identified as the main impediment to knowledge activities, and therefore leaders should model the proper behaviors causing culture to evolve in a way that enables and motivates knowledge workers to create, codify, transfer, and use and leverage knowledge. In the literature this leadership behavior is referred to as ‘leading through a knowledge lens’. Leading through a knowledge lens has some special characteristics since it is dealing with knowledge workers having specialized expertise. Leading them can be done only by intellectual power, conviction, persuasion, and interactive dialog. It requires skills that build confidence and engagement. Therefore, leaders should establish trust and commitment that will help the knowledge organization to achieve its knowledge and business goals.     

Looking to the Internet for models of governance

If code is law then standards bodies are governments. This flawed but powerful metaphor suggests the need to examine more closely those standards bodies that are defining standards for the Internet. In this paper we examine the International Telecommunications Union, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the World Wide Web Consortium. We compare the organizations on the basis of participation, transparency, authority, openness, security and interoperability. We conclude that the IETF and the W3C are becoming increasingly similar. We also conclude that the classical distinction between standards and implementations is decreasingly useful as standards are embodies in code – itself a form of speech or documentation. Recent Internet standards bodies have flourished in part by discarding or modifying the implementation/standards distinction. We illustrate that no single model is superior on all dimensions. The IETF is not effectively scaling, struggling with its explosive growth with the creation of thousands of working groups. The IETF coordinating body, the Internet Society, addressed growth by reorganization that removed democratic oversight. The W3C, initially the most closed, is becoming responsive to criticism and now includes open code participants. The IEEE SA and ITU have institutional controls appropriate for hardware but too constraining for code. Each organization has much to learn from the others.     

Correlates of leisure-time reading

Pupils from middle-class homes devoted an average of 7.2 per cent of leisure time to reading. The relationship between home environment, attitude to reading and motivations for reading on the one hand and leisure-time reading on the other, was examined. The addition of these sets of variables to previously established correlates of leisure-time reading, achievement, sex, and library membership increased the proportion of variance accounted for in leisure-time reading by a significant amount (10.1 per cent). Correlations tended to be low, since leisure reading is a relatively sporadic type activity. From the perspective of developing the reading habit, the results suggest that what parents do is more important than what they are; the emphasis placed on reading in the home, on academic development and on intellectuality was related to leisure-time reading. Attitude to reading correlated more highly with leisure-time reading than any of the other variables included in the study; the correlation between attitude and time was significant even after controlling for sex, reading achievement and library membership. Among the motivational variables, reading for enjoyment was related to leisure-time reading whereas reading for utilitarian or escapist reasons was not.     

Cognitive preferences: A validation study

In 1964 Health introduced the cognitive preference construct and used it to evaluate a new science curriculum. Since then the construct, adapted from research on cognitive styles, has been used in many research and evaluation studies. More recently, however, a number of questions have been raised concerning the validity of findings and analytical techniques employed in these studies. Ultimately the validity of the cognitive preference construct itself is being questioned.In this article a framework for examining validity evidence for the cognitive preference construct is developed; the literature on cognitive preferences in the context of this framework is reviewed, and the validity evidence developed in one recent study is presented and discussed.