Abstract. In our on-going endeavor to teach students better help-seeking skills we designed a three-pronged Help-Seeking Support Environment that includes (a) classroom instruction (b) a Self-Assessment Tutor, to help students evaluate their own need for help, and (c) an updated version of the Help Tutor, which provides feedback with respect to students ’ help-seeking behavior, as they solve problems with the help of an ITS. In doing so, we attempt to offer a comprehensive helpseeking suite to support the knowledge, skills, and dispositions students need in order to become more effective help seekers. In a classroom evaluation, we found that the Help-Seeking Support Environment was successful in improving students’ declarative help-seeking knowledge, but did not improve students ’ learning at the domain level or their help-seeking behavior in a paper-and-pencil environment. We raise a number of hypotheses in an attempt to explain these results. We question the current focus of metacognitive tutoring, and suggest ways to reexamine the role of help facilities and of metacognitive tutoring within ITSs.

Abstract not found

Previous research on peer tutoring has found that students sometimes benefit academically from tutoring other students. In this study we combined quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore how untrained peer tutors learned via explaining and responding to tutee questions in a non-reciprocal tutoring setting. In support of our hypotheses, we found that tutors learned most effectively when their instructional activities incorporated reflective knowledge-building in which they monitored their own understanding, generated inferences to repair misunderstandings, and elaborated upon the source materials. However, tutors seemed to adopt a knowledge-telling bias in which they primarily summarized the source materials with little elaboration. Tutors’ reflective knowledge-building activities, when they occurred, were more frequently elicited by interactions with their tutee. In particular, when tutees asked questions that contained an inference or required an inferential answer, tutors ’ responses were more likely to be elaborative and metacognitive. Directions for future research are also discussed.

The goal of this study was to investigate the relation between a set of pre-decisional beliefs including students' task value, self-e$cacy, and learning and performance goal orientations and "ve post-decisional, implementation strategies students use to regulate their e!ort and persistence for the academic tasks assigned for a speci"c class. A group of eighth grade students (N"114) completed a self-report survey that assessed these four motivational beliefs and the frequency that they used "ve motivational regulation strategies including self-consequating, environmental control, interest enhancement, and mastery and performance self-talk. Results from a series of multiple regressions indicated that the motivational beliefs, as a group, could be used to explain students' reported use of each of the regulatory strategies examined. Further, results indicated that task value, learning goal orientation, and performance goal orientation individually explained three or more of the regulatory strategies, whereas self-e$cacy was not related signi"cantly to any of the "ve regulatory strategies studied. Findings are presented and interpreted in light of their signi"cance for models specifying both motivational and volitional aspects of self-regulation. # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

social ability in online learning environments

Abstract. In our on-going endeavor to teach students better help-seeking skills we designed a three-pronged Help-Seeking Support Environment that includes (a) classroom instruction (b) a Self-Assessment Tutor, to help students evaluate their own need for help, and (c) an updated version of the Help Tutor, which provides

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A course(ware) generator (CG) assembles a sequence of educational resources that support a student in achieving his learning goals. CG offers a middle way between pre-authored “one-size-fits-all” courseware and individual look-up of learning objects. Existing course generators however, incorporate only limited CG knowledge. They only handle a single, limited type of course and cannot handle scenarios. In this paper, we present a course generator that implements a previously unrealized amount of pedagogical knowledge. We illustrate the expressivity of this CG knowledge by describing six different scenarios. An additional novel feature is that the courses it generates are structured in sections and subsections which makes orientation and navigation easier for students. We also present the results of Europe-wide formative and summative evaluation. The evaluation investigated the students ’ view on CG in general and for each scenario in particular. The data show that the realized adaptivity is appreciated by the learners and that the learner-driven usage of the course generator helps learners to find they own way of learning and makes them feel being respected, treated as adults.

In vivo experiments on whether supporting metacognition

In this study, we address whether learner characteristics can provide data to inform adaptive scaffolding of scientific inquiry skills in our learning environment, Science Assistments. We found that academic efficacy positively predicted students ’ skills at generating hypotheses; another subscale, skeptical of school relevance, negatively predicted students ’ skills at conducting controlled experiments, specifically controlling for variables strategies (CVS).