Recent calls for instructional innovation in undergraduate science, mathematics, engineering, and technology (SMET) courses and pro-grams highlight the need for a solid foundation of education research at the undergraduate level on which to base policy and practice. We report herein the results of a recta-analysis that integrates research on undergraduate SMET education since 1980. The meta-analysis dem-onstrates that various forms of small-group learning are effective in promoting greater academic achievement, more favorable attitudes toward learning, and increased persistence through SMET courses and programs. The magnitude of the effects reported in this study exceeds most findings in comparable reviews of research on educa-tional innovations and supports more widespread implementation of small-group learning in undergraduate SMET. The need to strengthen science and mathematics education in the U.S. was repeatedly emphasized in education studies conducted during the 1980s (e.g.,

There is much positive research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments in asynchronous distributed learning groups (DLGs). There is also research that shows that contemporary CSCL environments do not completely fulfil expectations on supporting interactive group learning, shared understanding, social construction of knowledge, and acquisition of competencies. There appear to be two major pitfalls impeding achievement of the desired social interaction in CSCL environments: taking social interaction in groups for granted and the lack of attention paid to the social psychological dimension of social interaction outside of the task context. Current solutions offered to avoid the pitfalls placed responsibility on instructors and teachers to encourage collaborative learning and social interaction. To both free educators from this burden and be more cost effective, we propose an intelligent CSCL environment. The environment is based upon a theoretical framework that suggests embedding certain properties in the environment to act as social contextual facilitators- social affordances- to initiate and sustain learner’s social interactions. Finally, a group awareness widget (GAW)- a software tool providing the learner group awareness about the others in the task and in the non-task context- is introduced as an embodiment of this theoretical framework.

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This paper presents a case study of an on-line workshop that was conducted via the WWW. Using the participant dialogues from the workshop bulletin boards, the author investigates whether Wenger’s (1998) Community of Practice framework can be applied to this educational setting. The results indicate that participants interactions in the workshop demonstrated the characteristics of mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. These three characteristics are what Wenger posits contribute to a cohesive community of practice. Using this framework, some principles are derived that educators can use to design more cohesive learning communities.

In this paper, we describe an innovative infrastructure to support student participation and collaboration and help the instructor manage large or distance classrooms using multiagent system intelligence. The system, called I-MINDS, has a host of intelligent agents for each classroom: a teacher agent ranks and categorizes real-time questions from the students and collects statistics on student participation, a number of group agents that each maintains a collaborative group and facilitate student discussions, and a student agent for each student that profiles a student and finds compatible students to form the student’s “buddy group”. Each agent is capable of machine learning, thus improving its performance and services over time. These agents also interact and collaborate among themselves to exchange information and form coalitions dynamically to better serve the users. We have pilot-tested I-MINDS in GIS lectures, deployed I-MINDS in an introductory computer science course (CS1)’s laboratory, and evaluated the impact of I-MINDS based on student assessment. The results showed that students using I-MINDS performed (and outperformed in some aspects) as well as students in traditional settings.

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How and why the presence of a person directly affects the perception and action of another person is a phenomenon that has been approached in a limited and piecemeal fashion within psychology. This kind of diffuse strategy has failed to capture the jointness of perception and action within and between people. In contradistinction, the authors offer a perspective that retains both integrally social features (e.g., involves interaction) and yet adequately exploits the current state of knowledge regarding the ecological properties of perception–action, while at the same time drawing on aspects of dynamic systems theory. In this article the authors review the best attempts to examine how one individual affects another’s perceptions and actions in the emergence of a social unit of action. Two important approaches, the individual-level and cognitive dynamics approaches, have yielded insights that derive in significant degree from principles of ecological psychology and/or dynamical systems theory. Prototypic of the individual-level approach is a focus on what can be perceived by coactors with the aim of uncovering how the dispositional qualities (affordances) of another person are informationally specified during social interaction. In contrast, the cognitive dynamics approach simulates dynamical characteristics of cognition and psychological influence with the aim of uncovering how cooperative interaction emerges out of its component parts. The authors argue that these approaches involve, respectively, insufficient mutuality and insufficient embodiment. Consequently, a social synergy perspective is discussed that approaches the problem of socially cooperative interaction at the relational, nonreductive level, using novel methods to examine how social perception and action emerge through self-organizing processes.

An increasing number of collaborative learning environments is based on shared workspace systems using two-dimensional graph-structured visual representations such as argumentation networks and concept maps. We propose an integrated framework that allows for flexibly specifying a wide range of visual languages and plugging in components for operational semantics, adequate feedback and intelligent support. The generic application CardBoard provides card-based user interaction and collaboration by means of different languages in shared workspaces. To enhance modifiability, the interfaces between the distributed heterogeneous system components, particularly between intelligent components and user interfaces, have been standardised.

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