Eran Yogev, Y. Gal, David R Karger, M. Facciotti, Michele Igo
Reading material has been part of course teaching for centuries, but until recently students' engagement with that reading, and its effect on their learning, has been difficult for teachers to assess. In this article, we explore the idea of examining cognitive engagement---a measure of how deeply a student is thinking about course material, which has been shown to correlate with learning gains---as it varies over different sections of the course reading material. We show that a combination of automatic classification and visualization of cognitive engagement anchored in the text can give teachers---and not only researchers---valuable insight into their students' thinking, suggesting ways to modify their lectures and their course readings to improve learning. We demonstrate this approach with analyzing students' comments in two different courses (Physics and Biology) using the Nota Bene annotation platform.
{"title":"Classifying and visualizing students' cognitive engagement in course readings","authors":"Eran Yogev, Y. Gal, David R Karger, M. Facciotti, Michele Igo","doi":"10.1145/3231644.3231648","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3231644.3231648","url":null,"abstract":"Reading material has been part of course teaching for centuries, but until recently students' engagement with that reading, and its effect on their learning, has been difficult for teachers to assess. In this article, we explore the idea of examining cognitive engagement---a measure of how deeply a student is thinking about course material, which has been shown to correlate with learning gains---as it varies over different sections of the course reading material. We show that a combination of automatic classification and visualization of cognitive engagement anchored in the text can give teachers---and not only researchers---valuable insight into their students' thinking, suggesting ways to modify their lectures and their course readings to improve learning. We demonstrate this approach with analyzing students' comments in two different courses (Physics and Biology) using the Nota Bene annotation platform.","PeriodicalId":20634,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89943901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Zichao Wang, Andrew S. Lan, Weili Nie, Andrew E. Waters, Phillip J. Grimaldi, Richard Baraniuk
The ever growing amount of educational content renders it increasingly difficult to manually generate sufficient practice or quiz questions to accompany it. This paper introduces QG-Net, a recurrent neural network-based model specifically designed for automatically generating quiz questions from educational content such as textbooks. QG-Net, when trained on a publicly available, general-purpose question/answer dataset and without further fine-tuning, is capable of generating high quality questions from textbooks, where the content is significantly different from the training data. Indeed, QG-Net outperforms state-of-the-art neural network-based and rules-based systems for question generation, both when evaluated using standard benchmark datasets and when using human evaluators. QG-Net also scales favorably to applications with large amounts of educational content, since its performance improves with the amount of training data.
{"title":"QG-net: a data-driven question generation model for educational content","authors":"Zichao Wang, Andrew S. Lan, Weili Nie, Andrew E. Waters, Phillip J. Grimaldi, Richard Baraniuk","doi":"10.1145/3231644.3231654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3231644.3231654","url":null,"abstract":"The ever growing amount of educational content renders it increasingly difficult to manually generate sufficient practice or quiz questions to accompany it. This paper introduces QG-Net, a recurrent neural network-based model specifically designed for automatically generating quiz questions from educational content such as textbooks. QG-Net, when trained on a publicly available, general-purpose question/answer dataset and without further fine-tuning, is capable of generating high quality questions from textbooks, where the content is significantly different from the training data. Indeed, QG-Net outperforms state-of-the-art neural network-based and rules-based systems for question generation, both when evaluated using standard benchmark datasets and when using human evaluators. QG-Net also scales favorably to applications with large amounts of educational content, since its performance improves with the amount of training data.","PeriodicalId":20634,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale","volume":"119 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74289341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Originally, online higher education was imagined to be a utopia for women because gender would be less salient when learners were not physically co-present and thus gender power issues would be lessened. Unfortunately, gender power is present in online classes, hindering women from experiencing the benefits of an equitable learning environment. One approach to eliminating gender power in online classes is to design courses with gender equity in mind. The existing best practices for designing online courses, however, were not developed for the specific purpose of upending gender power. In this poster, I synthesize the best practices for online course design and pose recommendations informed by feminist pedagogy. As more faculty are encouraged to teach online, an updated set of design recommendations that best supports women online learners is valuable both for practitioners and researchers.
{"title":"Contemporary online course design recommendations to support women's cognitive development","authors":"Virginia L. Byrne","doi":"10.1145/3231644.3231688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3231644.3231688","url":null,"abstract":"Originally, online higher education was imagined to be a utopia for women because gender would be less salient when learners were not physically co-present and thus gender power issues would be lessened. Unfortunately, gender power is present in online classes, hindering women from experiencing the benefits of an equitable learning environment. One approach to eliminating gender power in online classes is to design courses with gender equity in mind. The existing best practices for designing online courses, however, were not developed for the specific purpose of upending gender power. In this poster, I synthesize the best practices for online course design and pose recommendations informed by feminist pedagogy. As more faculty are encouraged to teach online, an updated set of design recommendations that best supports women online learners is valuable both for practitioners and researchers.","PeriodicalId":20634,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale","volume":"106 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88102369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Knowledge tracing is one of the key research areas for empowering personalized education. It is a task to model students' mastery level of a knowledge component (KC) based on their historical learning trajectories. In recent years, a recurrent neural network model called deep knowledge tracing (DKT) has been proposed to handle the knowledge tracing task and literature has shown that DKT generally outperforms traditional methods. However, through our extensive experimentation, we have noticed two major problems in the DKT model. The first problem is that the model fails to reconstruct the observed input. As a result, even when a student performs well on a KC, the prediction of that KC's mastery level decreases instead, and vice versa. Second, the predicted performance for KCs across time-steps is not consistent. This is undesirable and unreasonable because student's performance is expected to transit gradually over time. To address these problems, we introduce regularization terms that correspond to reconstruction and waviness to the loss function of the original DKT model to enhance the consistency in prediction. Experiments show that the regularized loss function effectively alleviates the two problems without degrading the original task of DKT.1
{"title":"Addressing two problems in deep knowledge tracing via prediction-consistent regularization","authors":"Chun-Kit Yeung, D. Yeung","doi":"10.1145/3231644.3231647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3231644.3231647","url":null,"abstract":"Knowledge tracing is one of the key research areas for empowering personalized education. It is a task to model students' mastery level of a knowledge component (KC) based on their historical learning trajectories. In recent years, a recurrent neural network model called deep knowledge tracing (DKT) has been proposed to handle the knowledge tracing task and literature has shown that DKT generally outperforms traditional methods. However, through our extensive experimentation, we have noticed two major problems in the DKT model. The first problem is that the model fails to reconstruct the observed input. As a result, even when a student performs well on a KC, the prediction of that KC's mastery level decreases instead, and vice versa. Second, the predicted performance for KCs across time-steps is not consistent. This is undesirable and unreasonable because student's performance is expected to transit gradually over time. To address these problems, we introduce regularization terms that correspond to reconstruction and waviness to the loss function of the original DKT model to enhance the consistency in prediction. Experiments show that the regularized loss function effectively alleviates the two problems without degrading the original task of DKT.1","PeriodicalId":20634,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91002235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}