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Ray Bareiss*, Susan M. Williams**
*The Institute for the Learning Sciences School of Education and Social Policy
Northwestern University Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60201 Evanston, IL 60201
Tel: +1-708-491-3500 Tel: +1-708-467-2813
E-mail: bareiss@ils.nwu.edu
**The Institute for the Learning Sciences School of Education and Social Policy
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60201
Tel: +1-708-467-2813
E-mail: williams@ils.nwu.edu
This paper describes ASK Jasper, a hypermedia performance support system that provides a structured work environment and in-context help and advice to students as they learn the concepts and skills of empirical geometry through solving a complex design problem.
Educational Applications,Performance support,Hypermedia
Corporate training is in the midst of a paradigm shift from the current practice of training workers prior to performing a task to performance support while they are performing it. This shift is being driven by rapid and constant changes in job roles and technology; training simply cannot keep up with the demands of the workplace [1]. A performance support system combines tools and knowledge resources designed to enable performance by providing a work context aligned to the worker's task and pre-existing skills. Support is provided by mechanisms that present and structure information, advice, and other resources at the moment of need to reduce the amount of job knowledge that must be internalized to perform the task [2].
Modern theories of education advocate situating the instruction of even young students in problem-based, learn-by-doing curricula (e.g., [3,4]). Given this position, it is natural to ask if performance support technology can be adapted to provide support for students, not just to meet performance goals, but also to meet learning goals. There is, of course, a fundamental difference between the two situations: Performance support for practitioners focuses on achieving results and efficiency. In contrast, performance support for learners emphasizes supporting students as they acquire new skills and knowledge.
ASK Jasper is a computer-based hypermedia environment designed
to support middle school students as they learn empirical geometry
in the course of solving a complex design problem. Their problem
is to design a playground subject to a number of requirements
and constraints imposed by safety considerations and by limited
resources.
To do this successfully, students must use empirical geometry to create their designs and must communicate them to others by constructing scale drawings.
General guidance is provided by a goal/subgoal task model of the design process. This structures students' problem solving by helping them keep track of where they are in the problem space and provides cues when they do not know what to do next. It is up to the students to track their progress, i.e., which steps they have completed and what remains to be done. At the highest level, the model guides the students to understand the problem, to design one or more components, to integrate the components into an overall design, to execute the design, and to reflect on the success of the design and what has been learned. Each of these high-level goals is, in-turn, broken down into subgoals. The student may iterate through them several times as a design is created and revised.
While it provides an overall structure, such a task model does not provide sufficient procedural guidance for some students. Therefore, brainstorming questions are associated with each of the subtasks to provide ideas on how to go about solving the design problem, e.g., by breaking the problem down into subproblems, using expert design heuristics, evaluating work in progress, and reflecting on what has been learned. These heuristics are not specific to the playground design problem. With minor modifications, they can be applied to any design problem.
A student in difficulty may not receive sufficiently specific assistance from the task model and the associated brainstorming questions. Therefore, a performance support database of example designs (cf. [1]) with accompanying rationales and procedural guidance is provided as a design resource. This database contains actual designs of pieces of playground equipment and layouts that are offered as solutions to the design problem. While designing ASK Jasper, we worried about providing such examples, rather than providing examples by analogy to other design tasks. We decided to provide direct examples because we felt that less successful students would have difficulty in transferring the associated procedures and issues across domains.
However, because our goal is to support students as they learn about math and design in the context of creating a design themselves, we did not want to provide designs and other information that could simply be copied. Therefore, the database is populated with imperfect examples - examples that are substantially correct, but do not meet the requirements and constraints of the problem. A student must recognize and correct these discrepancies if he or she is to reuse the design successfully. Eventually, the database will contain many example designs that span the range of naive conceptions of the design problem and related mathematical concepts. Studying multiple designs, may assist students in recognizing and avoiding imperfections in their designs.
As noted, the database contains much more than example designs. It utilizes the ASK methodology for creating structured hypermedia systems [5] to augment each example design with several additional categories of information:
Notes in the database can be graphics, text, or digital video, as appropriate to what is being conveyed. Taken together, a sequence of notes comprises a design episode, whose components are indexed by the task model.
The student creates and documents his or her design in a separate database that has a structure identical to that of the performance support database. Design notes are created using a simple word processor built into the database and any commonly available graphics and video programs. Alternatively, designs can be created on paper and input via a scanner. Because both databases are indexed by a common task model, the system can generally track the student's progress and provide access to relevant examples on request. After the student's design has been completed, evaluated, and revised, it is published into the performance support database for use by others. The student can use hypermedia linking facilities to link his or her design notes to notes which were relevant to its creation.
While ASK Jasper has significant commonalties with performance support systems that are being constructed in industry for practitioners, its pedagogical intent gives rise to significant differences in four areas:
1. Building knowledge vs. creating products: The economic demands of the workplace require practitioners to be productive, even while learning. In contrast, knowledge and skills are the products of a student's work. Reflecting this different emphasis, ASK Jasper does not provide some of the tools that would be provided to a practitioner. For example, we could automate many of the key mathematical tasks, such as the calculation of perimeter, area, and volume or the creation of dimensioned scale drawings. However, one of the primary curricular objectives is to have students acquire these skills while using them in a realistic context.
2. Differences in pre-existing knowledge. We expect the student to bring less knowledge and experience to bear on problems than practitioners, so the procedural help tends to be much more basic. Very specific help is possible because the student is solving a known problem.
3. Database Contents and Use: In the ideal case, a practitioner will find an example in the database that matches his or her needs exactly and simply be able to copy it to solve a new problem. In contrast, we want a student to generate a solution. Therefore, examples in the student database are not directly applicable, so that they cannot be copied without modification to solve the new problem; at a minimum the student must understand the requirements and constraints of the design problem and how a design fails to meet them, and he or she must adapt the design to do so.
4. Adding to Group Memory: A primary goal of the student
is to add to the database of design examples. The task of articulating
what has been learned has important cognitive consequences and
is highly motivational. In contrast, the practitioner is focused
on task performance and is likely to view the entry of information
into the archive as a distraction.
ASK Jasper is fully implemented, as described, and we are currently engaged in user testing with a group of middle school students of mixed abilities. Based on the results of these tests, the software will be revised, and we plan to use ASK Jasper in two middle school math classes this spring.
This work has been funded by a McDonnell Foundation post-doctoral fellowship to Dr. Williams. Dr. Bareiss is supported, in part, by ARPA (contract F30602-94-C-0219), and ILS's corporate sponsors, Andersen Consulting and Ameritech.