Two ALLS papers were accepted as journal papers in the Research and Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning Journal.
The first paper, entitled “Challenges to transferring western field research methods to developing world contexts”, was written by Dr. Didith Rodrigo, Jessica Sugay, Jen Agapito, and JR Reyes.
Abstract. Much of the research currently undertaken in the area of intelligent tutoring systems hails from the Western countries. To counteract any bias that this situation produces, to gain greater representation from the rest of the world, and to produce systems and publications that take cultural factors in to account, experts recognize the need for more intercultural evaluations and collaborations. For these collaborations to be successful, though, methods and materials require modification. Field work methodologies used in developed countries have to be nuanced when transferred to developing world contexts. In specific, the paper describes five challenges that researchers must address in the transfer process: technology adoption, school support, infrastructure, student culture, and force majeure.
The second paper, entitled “An Exploratory Study of Factors Indicative of Affective States of Students using SQL-Tutor”, was written by Thea Guia, Dr. Didith Rodrigo, Michelle Dagami, Jessica Sugay, Francis Macam, and Antonja Mitrovic.
Abstract. The goal of this study was to model the affective states exhibited by students using SQL-Tutor. Based on current literature, we selected academic affective states of interest and measured their incidence among students during an SQL-Tutor session. We observed that students using SQL-Tutor most often exhibited engaged concentration, confusion and boredom; however, none of these states were correlated with student achievement on the final exam. Using D’Mello’s Likelihood metric, L, we found that boredom and frustration tended to persist. We then correlated features extracted from SQL-Tutor log files with these two states’ L values. We found that boredom was negatively correlated with the number of completed/attempted problems, and the number of constraints used. It was positively correlated with the average time needed to complete problems and the average number of attempts. Persistent boredom was negatively correlated with the number of solved problems and positively correlated with the mean time to solve problems and the average number of attempts per solved problem. Frustration was not significantly correlated with any of the factors, but persistent frustration was negatively correlated with the number of constraints used and positively correlated with the average number of attempts per solved problem.
