This paper deals with the design of interactivity in visualization tools. There are several factors that can be used to guide the analysis and design of the interactivity of these tools. One such factor is flow, which is concerned with the duration of interaction with visual representations of information--interaction being the actions performed…

This fascinating and inventive book surveys the UDL research field in comprehensive detail while pointing in--imaginative and necessary ways--to crucial research undertakings yet to come. In recent years there has been heightened interest in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), particularly within the worlds of education policy and practice. As a…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are effective tools for education. However, developing them is a labour-intensive and time-consuming process. A major share of the effort is devoted to acquiring the domain knowledge that underlies the system's intelligence. The goal of this research is to reduce this knowledge acquisition bottleneck and better…

More and more things that humans used to do can be automated on computer. In each case, complex tasks have been automated -- not to the extent that they can be done as well as humans, but better. I will draw and develop parallels to education -- showing how and why advances in the Structural Learning Theory (SLT) and the AuthorIT development and…

Identifying effective tutorial dialogue strategies is a key issue for intelligent tutoring systems research. Human-human tutoring offers a valuable model for identifying effective tutorial strategies, but extracting them is a challenge because of the richness of human dialogue. This article addresses that challenge through a machine learning…

Participants read a series of news articles, each containing a target event followed by 2 causes. To study the ease with which readers update their mental representation as they proceed through the text, the certainty of the first cause was manipulated: It was presented as either a certain explanation of the subsequent target event or as a…

Processing of multiple representations in multimedia learning environments is considered to help learners obtain a more complete overview of the domain and gain deeper knowledge. This is based on the idea that relating and translating different representations leads to reflection beyond the boundaries and details of the separate representations.…

This study examines how students in the early stages of learning about the concept of functions, describe a curve and, in particular, evaluate the appropriateness of their argument about the representation of a function. Students are offered a message game which is related to a curve drawn on a coordinate system, representing an "imaginary…

The author discusses the theoretical lens, origins, and environment of his work on computerized business simulations. Key ideas that inform his work include the two dimensions (control and interaction) of computerized simulation, the two ways of representing a natural process (phenotypical and genotypical) in a simulation, which he defines as a…

Humans and animals can perform much more complex tasks than they can acquire using pure trial and error learning. This gap is filled by teaching. One important method of instruction is shaping, in which a teacher decomposes a complete task into sub-components, thereby providing an easier path to learning. Despite its importance, shaping has not…

My research interest has been in understanding the human communities formed through interpersonal social activities. Participation in online communities on social network sites such as Twitter has been observed to influence people's behavior in diverse ways including financial decision-making and political choices, suggesting the rich potential…

In this paper, we consider theories about processes of visual perception and perception-based knowledge representation (VPR) in order to explain difficulties encountered in figural processing in junior high school geometry tasks. In order to analyze such difficulties, we take advantage of the following perspectives of VPR: (1) Perceptual…

People use external knowledge representations (KRs) to identify, depict, transform, store, share, and archive information. Learning how to work with KRs is central to be-coming proficient in virtually every discipline. As such, KRs play central roles in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. We describe five key roles of KRs in assessment: (1)…

Adult developmental mathematics students often work under great pressure to complete the mathematics sequences designed to help them achieve success (Bryk & Treisman, 2010). Results of a teaching experiment demonstrate how the ability to reason can be impeded by flaws in students' mental representations of mathematics. The earnestness of the…

The heart of learning chemistry is the ability to connect a compound's structure to its function; Lewis structures provide an essential link in this process. In many cases, their construction is taught using an algorithmic approach, containing a set of step-by-step rules. We believe that this approach is in direct conflict with the precepts of…