Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences

On behalf of principal authors Thea Faye Guia and Jose Carlo Soriano, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo presented ALLS posters entitled “Modeling the affective states of students using SQL-Tutor” and “A cross-cultural comparison of effective help-seeking behavior among students using an ITS for math” during the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems held in Chania, Greece. Ms. Guia’s paper was a collaboration between the Ateneo de Manila and Dr. Antonja Mitrovic of the University of Canterbury. The authors were able to arrive at a statistically significant linear regression model for student boredom.

Mr. Soriano’s paper was a collaboration among researchers from the Ateneo de Manila, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Arizona State University, and the Universidad de Costa Rica. The authors found that help seeking behavior varied from country to country. Models for help seeking from one country performed poorly when applied to data from another country. This implied that help seeking has a strong cultural dimension.

Educational Data Mining Workshop with Dr. Joseph E. Beck

28 May 2012, 09:00-17:00
29 May 2012, 09:00-12:00

Ching Tan Room, Ateneo de Manila University

Presentations

1. Thrashing: Examining Students who Fail to Learn Material in a Timely Manner [PDF]
2. ASSISTments + Web Pages = WEBsistments: Integrating Procedural Practice and Web-based Content [PDF]
3. EdRank: Ranking Webpages by Their Educational Efficacy [PDF]
4. VAL: Virtual ASSISTments Laboratory [PDF]
5. Too Many Results: Focusing on  Strong, Casual Relationships in Data [PDF]
6. Graduate Studies in the US and at WPI [PDF]

Pictures

ALLS is pleased to host four interns from Ateneo de Naga University: Bon Teogene Balonzo, Gamaliel dela Cruz, Megan Bueno and Hazel Dayawon. All four were senior computer science majors. They will be staying with ALLS from 1 April to 31 May 2012.

Bon and Gama are currently working on improvements to the EDM Workbench, a project that required knowledge of Java and NetBeans . According to Bon, “During my stay at ALLS, my knowledge about programming has greatly increased! Since ALLS’s projects are based on Java, the real challenge for me was programming outside my comfort zone, C++, my native language.” For his part, Gama said, “I learned and need to learn more about the Java programming language. I learned more about the GUI things, those that I don’t usually use on programs that I write in Java.”

Knowledge of data mining was also core to the project. Prior to working at ALLS, neither Bon nor Gama had done any data mining work. Working on the workbench enabled them to familiarize themselves with the field. “Even though I don’t have any background in data mining,” Bon said, “I somehow got an idea of what it’s capable of doing while working and ‘playing’ with the project.” Gama added that the project was able to give him “a glimpse of data mining’s purpose or goal, that it helps people get useful information (even knowledge) from sets of data.”

Meg and Hazel, on the other hand, are continuing the Lab’s novice programmer studies. According to Hazel, “Reading articles and papers about novice programmer’s behaviors made me appreciate programming and I was completely overwhelmed with how much thought was and still given just to help novice programmers. I was happy with my work because whenever I review the novices’ programs, I can relate to it. It made me reminisce the time when I was still a novice programmer myself.”