Ebook: Towards Sustainable and Scalable Educational Innovations Informed by the Learning Sciences

The 13^th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2005) is being held from 28 November to 30 December 2005 in Singapore. It is the latest in a longstanding series of annual international conferences held in the Asia-Pacific region, highlighting top quality research on the application of computers in education.

The theme of the 2005 conference is “Towards sustainable and scalable educational innovations informed by the learning sciences” with a subtitle of “Sharing good practices of research, experimentation and innovation.” This theme reminds us that we need to be cognizant of research that can inform and lead to sustainable and scalable models of innovation. In order to do so, we need to take an inter-disciplinary view of learning, such as that embraced by the learning sciences. One of the basic principles that underpin the learning sciences is to improve theories of learning through the design of powerful learning environments that can foster meaningful learning. Learning sciences researchers prefer to research learning in authentic contexts. They collect both qualitative and quantitative data from multiple perspectives and follow developmental micro-genetic or historical approaches to data observation. Learning sciences researchers conduct research with the intention of deriving design principles through which change and innovation can be enacted. Their goal is to conduct research that can sustain transformations in schools.

ICCE 2005 will also demonstrate that learning sciences exist in the Asia-Pacific context. We have researchers and young academics within the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE) community who are concerned with issues of conducting research that can be translated into practice. Changes in practice are especially important to Asian countries because their educational systems are more centralized. Therefore, we believe that there is a need to reform pedagogy in a more constructivist and social direction in a scalable way.

Overall, we received 271 submissions for full papers and posters, of which 75 (28%) were accepted as full papers and 87 (32%) were accepted as short papers. The conference also includes 9 interactive events, 2 panels, 9 papers in the Doctoral Student Consortium, as well as paper presentations in the Local Track in which teachers in Singapore share practices and experiences of using technology in the classroom. Also in the Proceedings are brief abstracts of the talks of the four invited speakers: Joseph Krajcik of the University of Michigan, Jeremy Roschelle of Stanford Research Institute International, Takashi Sakamoto of the Japan Association for Promotion of Educational Technology, and Stella Vosniadou of the University of Athens.

The work to organize a conference of this size is immense. We would like to thank many people who have helped to make it possible. We thank Seng-Chee Tan, the chair of the Local Organizing Committee, and in particular the committee members: Wenli Chen, Ching-Puang Chin, David Junsong Huang, Li-Ching Ng, Choon-Lan Quek, Shirley Seet, Qiyun Wang, Angela Wong, Sheryl Eunice Wong, Philip Wong, and Huay-Lit Woo.

The Program Committee is critical to having a strong program. Almost all full paper submissions had 3 reviews while every short paper had 2 reviews. Thanks to all the Program Committee members for completing their reviews. Thanks, too, to the reviewers who were recruited by Program Committee members to help out in this critical task.

The committees organizing the other events at the conference also have helped to make the conference richer and broader: Doctoral Student Consortium, chaired by Yam-San Chee and Kinsuk; Tutorials and Workshops, chaired by Gee-Kin Yeo and Tsukasa Hirashima; and Interactive Events, chaired by Mun-Kew Leong and Lung-Hsiang Wong. The local track programme, which is a platform for Singapore teachers to share best practices of using technology for learning, is chaired by Sai-Choo Lee assisted by Yew-Meng Kwan, Bee-Kim Lim, Elsie Mathews and Shoo-Soon Wee. Thanks to all these colleagues.

Finally, we would like to thank Ben Chang and Hercy Cheng who provided the excellent conference submission and review system, as well as helped us to construct the proceedings.

If you enjoy participating in ICCE 2005 or reading the Proceedings, we recommend that you consider joining the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE – http://www.apsce.net/), an active scientific community that helps to forge on-going interactions among researchers in the Asia-Pacific region. The Society organizes the annual ICCE conferences and will start its own journal, namely, Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning.

We certainly hope that you will enjoy the ICCE-2005 conference, and that you find it illuminating, stimulating, and enjoyable.

Programme Co-chairs, Chee-Kit Looi, National Institute of Education, Singapore, David Jonassen, University of Missouri, USA, Mitsuru Ikeda, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan

This paper presents an analytical model of an agent about the capabilities of a learner for CSCL environments in DLV based on the ASP (Answer Sets Programming) formalism. The complete model is formally presented in the declarative language of DLV, a logic programming language for implementing ASP models. The model proposed provides a representation of the structural knowledge frontier and the social knowledge frontier of the learner, which are the components for the definition of the learner's zone of proximal development (zpd). Based on the zpd of its learner the agent can propose her a learning task and maintain the zpd for the learner in the group. The analytical model, as presented in the paper, runs using the DLV system that can be easily downloaded from the internet.

COLLECT-UML is an intelligent tutoring system that teaches Object-Oriented design using Unified Modelling Language (UML). UML is one of the most popular techniques used in the design and development of Object-Oriented systems nowadays. The Constraint-Based Modelling (CBM) has been used successfully in several systems and they have proved to be extremely effective in evaluations performed in real classrooms. In this paper, we present our experiences in implementing another constraint-based tutor, in the area of Object-Oriented design. We present the system's architecture and functionality and describe the results of a preliminary study with postgraduate students who interacted with the system as part of a think-aloud study. Participants felt that using the system helped them improve their UML knowledge. A full evaluation study is planned for May 2005, which aims to evaluate the interface and the effect of using the system on students' learning.

In 2002 RMIT UNIVERSITY (RMIT) were awarded a World Bank (WB) four year contract (2003 – 2006) by the AFRICAN VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY (AVU) for

• Delivery of a COMPUTER SCIENCE (CS) diploma and degree to 8 AVU Learning Centres (LC) in Africa using an INFORMATION COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY (ICT) mixed-mode delivery model, and

• Building capacity in the LEAD PARTNER UNIVERSITY (LPU), in this case the UNIVERSITY OF DAR ES SALAAM (UDSM) in Tanzania, so that they could take over the management & operations of the program from RMIT as from the end of the contract - Dec 2006.

The inclusion of effective CAPACITY BUILDING (CB) into the program was viewed as an essential and urgent requirement that would lead to an ongoing and sustainable program. This need is particularly important in the areas of ICT, where the technology has the potential to support education and contribute meaningfully to the development of economic and sustainable industries. To be effective, CB would need to be seen as a holistic process involving the whole organisation.

This paper describes:

• the complexities and key issues involved in developing a CB program with the primary objective being “To ensure that UDSM is “operationally ready” to take over the management and the delivery of CS Program from RMIT .by Dec 2006"

• the 'organisational mirroring' planning approach created to develop the CB program and

• the specific strategies and activities that formed the CB program.

Finally the paper reflects on the strategies and activities adopted and discusses key issues arising during implementation and lessons learned to date.

This paper explores some potentials and issues of fostering learning communities through Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) technology in Singapore classrooms. The subjects were eight teachers who attended a professional development course conducted at the National Institute of Education. The course focused on preparing teachers in integrating information technology into teaching and learning. CSCL, in particular, Knowledge Forum®, was adopted as a platform for online discussion and knowledge building on these technology integration issues. Interviews with these teachers and analysis of their online discussion suggest that they appreciate the knowledge building approach as a means for the students and themselves to learn beyond classroom and in promoting in-depth learning. However, the teachers felt that the approach was time consuming and was more suitable for high-ability students.

This study investigated within-group metacognition during group problem solving conducted within the context of a Knowledge Forum© CSCL learning environment. Three malfunctioning groups of students from a middle-grade primary school in an inner-city school in eastern Australia participated in this study. Prior to the study, the majority of the groups' time at the computer was spent on non-productive conflict. During the study, the three groups were provided with group strategies and metacognitive scaffolds to facilitate group metacognition. The scaffolds and strategies used were derived from the literature on metacognition, co-operative learning, problem solving, and computer-supported collaborative learning. The study found that providing students with metacognitive scaffolds and group strategies resulted in positive changes in the students' group work at the computer. The students developed an understanding of how to contribute effectively to their group which enhanced the groups' problem solving and knowledge-building.

This study examines teachers' cognitive development when interacting with video ethnography, a form of video cases. It used grounded theory to discover embedded meanings and relationships that emerge from descriptive data collected from six teachers. Findings revealed the categories of cognitive activities when using video ethnography and teachers' progression in a cognitive development process through interaction with video ethnography. The study has implications in improving technology use in teacher development, production of video cases, and research on case-based pedagogy and other related areas.

It has already been proven that peer tutoring is an effective way to engage students in learning. However, without technology support, it can be difficult to conduct peer tutoring program in a classroom. We propose a system called P³T that supports peer tutoring in one-to-one digital learning environment. P³T facilitates peer tutoring by scaffolding both tutors and tutees to prepare for the tutorial session and facilitating their elaborations during the face-to-face tutoring. An experiment was executed to test if the P³T system can help the activity go more smoothly than those without P³T system. This paper discusses the design of P³T models and system, and reports what is found in our experiment.

This paper reports the research findings from a national research program conducted in rural India. In this research, children were provided unconditional access to public, outdoor computer. Evaluation was conducted on the children's ability to learn to operate the computer and the effect of such playground computing on educational outcome.

The results suggest that playground computers might have an important role to play in improving the outcomes of elementary education and in imparting critical life skills.

Selection of an appropriate assessment method has become a crucial issue in computer programming courses as many feel the traditional paper-based examinations are not delivering the desired results for either students or educators. The poor performance of students in written exams and their lack of real-world programming skills have encouraged educators to seek assessment methods other than pen and paper. This paper presents the findings of a study of an introductory computer programming final assessment which applied a combination of paper-based and laboratory exams. Pre-exam and post-exam surveys were conducted to find out students' attitudes towards the new assessment method and to investigate factors which have been shown in other studies to impact on test performance. Relationships between test anxiety and student characteristics of gender, previous computer experience and previous experience with computer-based assessment were investigated and reported.

Amidst the millions of pages available on the Web, it contains an invaluable educational resources pool for planning episodes of learning approach for instructions and guided learning. The un-structured nature and the lack of suitably annotated materials make retrieving the relevant learning contents that meet different pedagogical needs a difficult and time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a framework as well as the design of a Personalized Instruction planner (PIP) that searches and annotates potentially useful learning content. Our approach is based on an ontology-driven and incremental approach to the annotation of educational content using the multi-agents infrastructure of a Personalized Education System (PES). The PIP which is a subsystem of the PES is composed of three software agents whose roles is to search, retrieve and classify potentially useful learning objects for personalized education guided by multiple ontologies that taxonomize subject domain, instructional design or pedagogy and content.

This paper reports on an online simulation designed to support pre-service teachers' practicum experiences in the important area of literacy teaching. The purpose of the simulation was to develop pre-service teacher understanding of complex classroom situations associated with the teaching of literacy by giving them the opportunity to work within a virtual environment. Our trials of this software have revealed that it has provided pre-service teachers with time to think critically about complex teaching situations which relied on the teacher's ability to respond to children's experiences, engage with them in dialogue and negotiation as well as utilise a range of indirect instructions such as questioning, modelling and prompting. Pre-service teachers have acknowledged that their experience with the simulation helped them to make their practicum experience more focused by giving them the knowledge and experience to more fully appreciate the impact of subtle changes that experienced teachers made during lessons.

The biggest barrier to innovation and change is not our resistance to learning something new, but rather unlearning what we think is the truth. Learning contexts should be diverse to evoke and capture student imagination. The pedagogy that underpins this process needs to focus on the development of students' ability to diagnose, simulate, problem solve, negotiate, construct, explore new ideas and exhibit their understanding.

In this research, a system was developed to enable underlining by learners to promote reading comprehension of e-learning instructional materials, and an attempt was made to further promote such underlining activity by evaluating and providing feedback on the learner's underlining. E-learning instructional materials implementing this feature were created and used as auxiliary instructional materials in actual classes, and a group of learners using instructional materials with underlining capability only were compared against a group of learners using instructional materials which also provided the feedback feature. The following results were obtained for the latter group: (1) The usage rate of the instructional materials was higher, (2) Underlining activities thought to be desirable for reading comprehension were more frequently seen, and (3) The rate of correct answers on a test for confirming reading comprehension was higher. These results suggest that the feedback feature for underlining which was implemented in this research is effective for promoting reading comprehension.

Interactive exercising is one of the major ingredients of technology-enhanced learning. It reaches its full potential only, when appropriate feedback is given to the learner. This paper describes a principled approach for representing and processing interactive exercises in ActiveMath. This approach relies (1) on a modular architecture of the exercise player, (2) on a separation of different types of knowledge that have to be handled to generate feedback, and (3) on a generic representation of interactive exercises.

The importance of cognitive skills in human learning and reasoning has grown progressively throughout the years. This motivates the search for a knowledge representation that supports the development of a computational algorithm that performs as well as instructs such cognitive skills. Cognitive skills can be broadly divided into two types; specific and generic cognitive skills. EpiList I is an ITS that develops generic cognitive skills namely classification, generalization, and comparison skills. However, EpiList I develops the skills implicitly in the tutorials that explicitly tutors the student on the domain knowledge. This is a major weakness of EpiList I in developing cognitive skills; namely: classification, generalization and comparison. EpiList II incorporates explicit instructions to develop the cognitive skills in EpiList I. The explicit instructions in EpiList II monitor, tutor, and assess the student's competency in the cognitive skills. The explicit instruction is equivalent to a closed-loop system.

An evaluation too for collaborative learning has been developed. The tool is based on communication which occurs during the collaborative work. The tool consists of two sub-tools: a monitoring tool and a scoring tool. The monitoring tool can evaluate automatically students' behaviors during collaborative work. The scoring tool can score automatically output products such as reports. The two tools are established by natural language techniques: TF/IDF method, vector space model method. As a result of experiments, we confirmed that the tool was able to provide rough evaluation of individual student in the collaborative learning. In addition, we confirmed that the tool has a weakness in the evaluation's accuracies when students copy & paste sentences from web-sites to their reports.

Mobile devices are getting more and more popular. With the advanced wireless technology, students can assess Internet with their PDAs. This study aims to develop an adaptive e-learning system on PDA. The idea is to distribute learning materials to the students adaptively. The adaptive engine is based on two levels of Bayesian networks. The first level measures the student performance and the second level determines the redistribution of materials when a student needs retaking. We divide the student performance into the study performance and the quiz performance. The quiz performance is measured by a computerized adaptive testing (CAT) while the study performance relates to the learning behavior of a student. Preliminary experiments demonstrated that student performance has been improved via the adaptive system.

This paper reports on the experiment and its results which was conducted to examine what conceptual changes are caused by using Error-based Simulation (EBS) in learning mechanics. The EBS simulates the motion of mechanical systems based on students' erroneous ideas to promote the awareness and correction of their errors. Ninety undergraduate students learned mechanics by solving problems and also worked on the pre-/post-tests. Two-thirds of them used EBSs and the rest didn't. One-third of them were interviewed about their problem-solving. The results were as follows. First, for novice students, the EBS significantly increased their performance in problem-solving and its effect was much greater than the one of interviews for facilitating students' reflection. Second, the effect of EBS was sufficient in simple problems, but insufficient in more complex problems especially for the correction of errors. Third, the effect of EBS on expert students was unclear in this experiment. Finally, though the effect of EBS on the transfer of learning wasn't clarified sufficiently, it was suggested that the EBS promoted the deeper understanding toward the transfer which was beyond merely providing the explanation of correct solutions. From these results, we concluded the EBS was useful to cause some conceptual change in learning mechanics.

This paper discusses theory and research issues associated with the use of hypermedia technologies to support learning in problem-oriented pedagogical environments involving cases. After considering research issues with problem-oriented learning related to knowledge transfer and conceptual change, a design framework is discussed for a hypermedia system with scaffolding features designed to support and enhance problem-oriented learning. An ongoing project using a new version of this hypermedia approach with special ontological scaffolding to explore conceptual change and far knowledge transfer issues related to learning advanced scientific knowledge involving complex systems is also discussed.

Information literacy is the ability to master the processes of becoming informed. An information literacy framework should focus on the capacity of students to build both cognitive and affective knowledge. This entails the formulation of standards and indicators. Hence, we conducted a survey, for which a questionnaire was developed to allow us to understand the views of school principals and teachers on the implementation of an information literacy framework for Hong Kong students. The research findings showed that the standards and indicators we established were recognised. The practitioners agreed with us that the implementation of information literacy standards in schools was not just an issue of enforcing standards; the objective should be to build the capacity of learners and to cultivate school culture.

A cognitive tool (CT) that helps learners to generate a knowledge of fraction equivalence, which comprises conceptual and procedural knowledge, has been built. The aim of this research is to study the effectiveness of the CT in generating a knowledge of fraction equivalence for classroom use. Two groups of learners were randomly selected to learn the subject knowledge. One group, the CTWSGp, initially started to learn with the CT and then worked with drilling-orientated worksheets (WS), and the other group, the WSCTGp, learned in the reverse order. The results of pre-test-post-test experimental studies show that both groups had gained competency in the knowledge of fraction equivalence by the end of the learning period. An analysis of the results indicates that learners in the CTWSGp group learnt the subject matter better than the WSCTGp group, and that the CT is a more effective tool than drilling-orientated worksheets.

Information literacy should be framed in such a way that students are empowered with the capacity for lifelong learning and assume greater autonomy over – and gain social responsibilities from – their learning. We conducted focus group discussions and in-depth interviews to collect ideas from practitioners on professional development in information literacy education. The research findings show that practitioners are concerned about the recognition of teachers and the training methods that will be used in the implementation of information literacy in schools. Professional development should focus on the content and the pedagogy of capacity building in school education. Three key issues in professional development are highlighted: realising capacity building, obtaining the consensus and support of school principals and teachers, and allowing practitioners the flexibility to organise their own development. Nine modules for the professional development of in-service and pre-service teachers are also proposed.

In an economy in which knowledge becomes more and more important as the main resource of economical success, workers, teams and companies need to develop the necessary competencies to be able to participate in a work life that is mainly based on knowledge productivity. In this paper we first outline knowledge work and its key issue areas. Second, we stress the necessity to combine work processes with training processes in the context of knowledge work. In the third part of this paper, we outline one approach developed by a consortium of research institutes and companies to overcome the gap between knowledge requested and content provided by a tool-based service to improve the skills of employees at the workplace.