| Grant Title: |
Allowing Learners to be Articulate: Incorporating Automated Text Evaluation into Collaborative Software Environments |
|---|---|
| Sponsor: | The James S. McDonnell Foundation: Cognitive Studies in Educational Practice (CSEP) program. |
| Principal Investigators: |
Gerhard Fischer, Walter Kintsch,
Tom Landauer |
| Period of Support: | {period} |
This project explores computer-based tools for supporting the collaborative construction of knowledge in classrooms. It seeks ways of developing the articulate self-expression of individual learners without over-burdening teachers.
Automated text evaluation mechanisms are investigated to replace fact-centered questions with open-ended, question-answer interactions, without requiring continuous teacher intervention. More generally, the project addresses how software environments can help students to learn in an information-intensive, technologically mediated world by matching individual competencies to appropriate resources.
Our goal is to explore how computer games and quizzes can support the construction of personal knowledge and the articulate self-expression of learners.Latent semantic analysis, or LSA, computes the semantic relations within a corpus of literature on a given subject matter and then uses this information to judge the semantic similarities among submitted written responses. This project incorporates LSA in a variety of ways within our educational software in order to explore a range of theoretical issues related to how computer-based media can help students learn.