CATO is an intelligent learning environment designed to help beginning law students learn basic skills of making arguments with cases. Using CATO, students practice tasks of induction and analogical argumentation. They practice testing theories against a body of cases and making written arguments about a problem, comparing and contrasting it to past cases. CATO’s model addresses arguments in which two opponents analogize a problem to favorable cases, distinguish unfavorable cases, assess the significance of similarities and differences between cases in light of normative knowledge about the domain, and use that knowledge to organize multi-case arguments. CATO communicates the model to students by presenting dynamically-generated argumentation examples and by reifying argument structure based on the model. CATO also provides a case database and tools based on the model that help make students ’ tasks more manageable. CATO was evaluated in the context of an actual legal writing course, in a study involving 30 first-year law students. We found that instruction with CATO leads to statistically significant improvement in students ’ basic argumentation skills, comparable

Abstract: A major technological concern of our work is to improve the cost effectiveness, reusability, and interoperability of advanced educational software. To make these technologies viable, we must be able to add component functionality incrementally, and enable systems to interoperate with commercial software and internet resources. We have designing and implemented an architecture that places shared resources and “heavyweight ” functionality on servers, and uses Java and Netscape to deliver student interfaces on a wide variety of client platforms at any location with internet access. This paper describes the architecture at five levels of description. Its strengths and weaknesses provide a case study in how to improve the deployability and interoperability of knowledge-based educational software without sacrificing advanced functionality. 1.

To be successful, CSCL technology must be adopted by teachers and incorporated into the activities of the classroom. This paper describes a comprehensive approach to supporting teachers learning to implement computer-supported collaborative inquiry in their classrooms. The approach comprises (1) a networked software system, “Belvedere, ” that provides students with shared workspaces for coordinating and recording their collaboration in scientific inquiry; (2) activity plans worked out collaboratively with teachers; (3) “challenge problems ” and Web-based materials designed to match and enrich the curriculum, and (4) self- and peer-assessment instruments given to students to guide the process of scientific inquiry. A fundamental aim of this work is to restructure the classroom and shift the initiative for learning activity to the students.

Scientific knowledge is dynamic in two senses: it changes and increases extremely rapidly, and it is thrust from the lab into the wider world and public forum almost as rapidly. This implies increasing demands on secondary school science education. Besides knowing key facts, concepts, and procedures, it is important for today’s students to understand the process by which the claims of science are generated, evaluated, and revised – an interplay between theoretical and empirical work (Dunbar & Klahr, 1989). The educational goals behind the work reported in this chapter are to improve students ’ understanding of this process and to facilitate students ’ acquisition of critical inquiry skills, while also meeting conventional subject matter learning objectives. In addition to the need to change what is taught, there are grounds to change how it is taught. Research shows that students learn better when they actively pursue understanding rather than passively

The Belvedere software environment was designed to support students engaged in collaborative learning while solving ill-structured problems requiring integration of multiple sources of data to evaluate competing hypotheses or solutions. Students are posed with web-based “science challenge problems,” which present a recent or current debate in science along with on-line articles, data, and suggestions for hands-on data-gathering activities. Students use the Belvedere inquiry-diagramming facility to record hypotheses under consideration, information gathered, and the evidential relations between them. Preliminary studies with Belvedere suggest that the design of representational tools can have a significant effect on the learners’ knowledge-building discourse. However, these effects are insufficiently studied. After several years of laying the groundwork by building and deploying such software, the author and colleagues have begun such an in-depth investigation, examining the effects of textual, diagrammatic and tabular representational tools on the quality of knowledge-building discourse between learners. The paper describes the Belvedere work that led to this position, lays out a research agenda, and describes pilot studies now underway.

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