5/100 The effect of contextualized conversational feedback in a complex open-ended learning environment

Segedy, J. R., Kinnebrew, J. S., & Biswas, G. (2013). The effect of contextualized conversational feedback in a complex open-ended learning environment. Educational Technology Research and Development, 61(1), 71-89.

Notes:

1. What is the theoretical foundation of the intervention design (why it should success)

In this article, the authors suggests two design guidelines for Open-End Learning Environments, which they think will benefit students' learning. But they don't offer any explicit theoretical reasons for the guideline, it is more like based on experiences and some general learning theory. This makes me think about "warrant". In our field, what are the researchers' common sense, by which I mean some learning or instruction principles that we don't need to write it explicitly as everyone knows.

It mentioned meta-cognitive strategies in the introduction part of the article, but didn't discuss it explicitly in the discussion part.

2. Measures 

This article use HMM and DSM to analyze students' learning behaviors in this OELEs. One measure for HMM is relevance: in my understanding based on their writing, it is a measure of the relationship between two adjoining actions. A higher score means this action is more informed by the previous action. It indicates "more systematic or focused approach to the learning task" (sounds like metacognition)

But they also wrote that both two analysis approach cannot match students' behaviors to the feedbacks. By which I think it means the variation of (high or low) relevance scores can not be account for the feedback. Also it is the pattern of a group of students not one specific students. I think maybe some qualitative analysis can help.

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Two guidelines for the design of feedback in OELEs to promote affect learning (p.72): Feedback should be contextualized by the student's task goal, learning artifacts and recent activities; Feedback should be delivered in a mix-initiative conversational format.

PA feedback is characterized by two main attributes. First, it is organized into prompts: short statements delivered as one-way communication. After an agent speaks, the learner has no opportunity to respond to the agent. Second, PA feedback is action-oriented; when students take an action in the system, agents delivering PA-feedback suggest potentially useful behaviors and strategies that are linked to that action.