Curry Education Research Lectureship Series Fall 2008
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September 19
Learning with Conversational Agents
Arthur Graesser
Dr. Graesser's Powerpoint Presentation (9.5MB)
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Learning with Conversational Agents
AutoTutor is an intelligent computer tutor that helps students learn by holding a conversation in natural language. AutoTutor has an animated conversational agent that guides the conversation by asking difficult questions and prompting the student to do the talking or action, as opposed to merely delivering information to the student in a lecture. AutoTutor’s learning objectives are pitched at deeper levels of reasoning, explanations, and mastery of complex systems, as opposed to shallow levels (such as memorizing definitions and facts). AutoTutor helps learning by nearly a letter grade, compared to suitable control conditions. We have recently explored the emotions that learners experience while learning with AutoTutor, such as flow (engagement), delight, confusion, frustration, boredom, and surprise. This presentation will describe AutoTutor and some of its recent descendants. A large landscape of pedagogical strategies can be implemented with ensembles of agents that engage in dialogues and trialogues with the learner.
Dr. Graesser is presently a full professor in the Department of Psychology and an adjunct professor in Computer Science at The University of Memphis. He is currently a co-director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems, chair of the Department of Psychology, and director of the Center for Applied Psychological Research. In 1977 Dr. Graesser received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at San Diego. He was a visiting researcher at Yale University in 1983, Stanford University in 1984, and Carnegie Mellon University in 1991. Dr. Graesser's primary research interests are in cognitive science and discourse processing. More specific interests include knowledge representation, question asking and answering, tutoring, text comprehension, inference generation, conversation, reading, education, memory, expert systems, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. He is currently editor of the journal Discourse Processes.
September 26
The Relation Between Reform Instruction & Student Learning
in Middle Grades Mathematics Classrooms
Carol Malloy
Dr. Malloy's Powerpoint Presentation (575KB)
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The Relation between Reform Instruction and Student Learning in Middle Grades Mathematics Classrooms
This research study examines the relation between the instructional practices of middle grades mathematics teachers and students’ understanding of procedural and conceptual knowledge (e.g., rational number, proportional reasoning, measurement, and problem solving). The study was conducted in a medium sized urban district serving a culturally, racially, and economically diverse student population. A valid and quantifiable observation protocol and interview was used to rate teachers’ use of teaching practices aligned with standards proposed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM, 2000). Student conceptual understanding was measured through constructed response items from TIMSS (1994) and the NAEP (1990, 1992, and 1996). Qualitative analyses were used to group classrooms according to reform teaching practices. Hierarchical Linear Modeling procedures were used to examine the influence of classroom differences in reform teaching practices students’ conceptual understanding. Results indicate that students in classrooms with teachers who had the highest level of reform teaching practice scored significantly higher on conceptual understanding measures than students in classrooms where teachers had lower levels of reform teaching practice. Overall, reform-oriented instructional practices accounted for an additional 27% of the variance in measures of conceptual understanding, with grade level, ethnicity, and prior ability controlled. Implications for classroom practices and future research are discussed.
Bio: Carol Malloy, Ph.D. is an associate professor in mathematics education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She teaches pre-service methods and mathematics courses and graduate foundations courses. Carol has taught mathematics for 20 years in high schools across the United States. Her scholarly interests focus on equity in education and reform. She is responsive to concerns that many students have difficulty learning mathematics and, specifically, that African-American, Latino and Native American students often lack opportunities to learn quality mathematics and gain necessary skills to perform and understand rigorous mathematics. As a result, she works in local, regional and national professional organizations for equitable opportunity and quality in education, with emphasis in mathematics.
October 31
Is It Just A Bad Class? Examining the Stability of Value-Added Measures
of Teacher Effectiveness
Dan Goldhaber
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Is It Just A Bad Class? Examining the Stability of Value-Added
Measures of Teacher Effectiveness
Dan Goldhaber is a Research Professor at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, an Affiliated Scholar at the Urban Institute’s Education Policy Center, and a Senior Non-resident Fellow at Education Sector. He also serves as the principal investigator of the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER): Washington team and is a member of CALDER's Strategic Planning Group. Dr. Goldhaber previously served as an elected member of the Alexandria City School Board from 1997-2002.
Dr. Goldhaber’s work focuses on issues of educational productivity and reform at the K-12 level, and the relationship between teacher labor markets and teacher quality. His current research addresses teacher labor markets and the role that teacher pay structure plays in teacher recruitment and retention; the relationship between teacher licensure test performance and student achievement; the stability of teacher effectiveness measures over time; the influence of human resource practices on teacher turnover and quality; and the role of community colleges in higher education.
Dr. Goldhaber holds degrees from the University of Vermont (BA, Economics) and Cornell University (MS and PhD, Labor Economics).
(Cancelled) November 14
Becoming Symbol-Minded
Judy DeLoache
Becoming Symbol-Minded
Every society has a wealth of symbols and symbol systems that support cognition and communication, and all children must master a variety of symbolic artifacts to participate fully in their society. In the process of learning to use various symbolic representations—
pictures, models, replica objects, educational materials—infants and young children experience a surprising amount of difficulty. I'll review research showing that infants and very young children often do not appreciate the distinction between symbols and their referents, behaving toward symbolic artifacts as if they were the objects they stand for. Somewhat older children can still have difficulty when asked to use concrete objects as supports for reasoning in educational settings.
Judy DeLoache is the William R. Kenan Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. She has conducted extensive research on cognitive development in infants and young children, with a particular focus on the early development of symbol use and understanding. She is the recipient of a Scientific MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. DeLoache has been a Fellow at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, as well as the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She has served as President of the Developmental Division of the American Psychological Association and as a member of the Executive Board of the International Society for Infancy Studies. Dr. DeLoache will receive an honorary degree from the University of Basel in November of this year.