Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-75). Also available in print.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-120). Also available in print.

This study examined an after-school tutoring and mentoring program that was implemented to help low-income students in the K-12 local district who were struggling with reading and mathematics. To date, the program has not been successful in improving student achievement. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to provide administrators and teachers with insights into parents' and teachers' perceptions of the program, with an emphasis on parental involvement (PI). Vygotsky's theory of social constructivism focused this study on the tenet that social interactions between parents, students, and teachers all impact the program students' construction of knowledge. The research questions focused on the teachers' and parents' perceptions of the effectiveness of the tutoring program, parental involvement, and suggestions to improve the program. Detailed qualitative data was collected through seven parents and three teachers structured interviews that were transcribed, open-coded, and analyzed across participants to identify recurrent themes. There were 5 themes: PI is crucial, behavior problems, improving parent-teacher communication, inadequate PI, and improving PI. Participants had mixed opinions of the effectiveness of the tutoring program, emphasized the importance of PI, and had many suggestions to improve the program. The project white paper includes 6 detailed recommendations supported by data, a timeline for implementation and materials for a teacher training component and a teacher-parent collaboration component. Positive social change may result if the study helps increase the amount of interaction between teachers and parents, increases attendance at parent meetings, and these changes help increase student test scores.

In a technology driven world, efforts are being made to make education/learning available to individuals at any time with no compromise in the quality of teaching/training. To make learning flexible, different techniques such as distributing learning material, uploading audio lectures on the web, and creating intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) are being used. The technique considered here is an adaptive ITS, a system that replicates the learning that occurs in a student teacher relationship. This thesis develops an adaptive intelligent tutoring system architecture prototype where the addition, modification and removal of educational material are relatively easy. The resulting software will take into account: the goals of the specific educational experience, the concepts to be covered, the preferred learning style of the student, measures to detect misuse of the system functionality, behavior based on the student's performance and the generation of hint sequences and feedback messages to improve learning gain. The system will accomplish these objectives by assessing the student's prior knowledge level, observing the actions performed by the student and by adapting to his/her learning abilities. The ITS will attempt to be more intelligent by performing some actions traditionally done by a human teacher - such as diagnosing misconceptions, identifying the most suitable learning style, stressing concepts that the student is finding difficult to understand, switching back to the learning material if the student shows no improvement after a set of trials. The system makes sure that the student is getting feedback where appropriate. Using this prototype system, the student will be tutored to acquire declarative knowledge. A problem based learning (PBL) approach will be used to strengthen the acquired knowledge by providing a high degree of personal attention to the student. To show how the prototype system works, an example of analysis of a control system problem using bode plot technique will be used to assist the student in using the technique to perform the stability analysis of an analog, linear, time-invariant control system problems and to recommend a controller to attain stability (if the system is not stable). Ideas of porting the system from standalone to web-based architecture and features required for collaborative learning will be discussed and an architecture for a web-based tutoring system for supporting multiple students enabling communication between students and sharing data among them will be proposed. / Electrical and Computer Engineering

This qualitative case study examined how volunteer tutors are interacting with at-risk adolescent ELL students in one-on-one tutoring sessions. This study also investigated how volunteer tutors are supporting vocabulary acquisition within tutoring sessions with adolescent ELLs. As a non-participant observer, I used ethnographic methods, including observations, interviews, and document analysis to understand how three tutors were interacting in sessions and how they were supporting vocabulary acquisition over seven weeks. The following questions guided the research: How do volunteer tutors interact in one-on-one tutoring sessions with at-risk adolescent ELLs? How are volunteer tutors supporting vocabulary acquisition for adolescent ELLs in one-on-one tutoring sessions? Data were analyzed to determine how volunteer tutors were interacting in sessions and supporting vocabulary. Six themes emerged to explain how tutors were interacting in sessions and three ‘a-priori’ themes explained how tutors were supporting vocabulary acquisition. The results of this study are used to inform schools who institute volunteer tutoring programs for at-risk populations, researchers interested in vocabulary acquisition and adolescent ELLs, and faculty or staff members who work with at-risk populations. Furthermore, recommendations for future research are discussed for the field of education. / Literacy & Learners

"Much work has been done to develop intelligent tutoring systems in domains such as algebra, geometry, and computer programming. Our work is to develop an intelligent tutoring system to train US soldiers. One main difference in this domain is that one of the main skills to be learned is cooperation between teammates, so the tutor must emphasize collaboration as a skill. In addition, to help train this skill the system must be able to run in real-time, and provide both computer generated teammates, as well as intelligent opposing forces. This system is the first real-time, multi-user, model tracing tutor with simulated teammates. The goal of this thesis is to build a prototype system to validate that this is a valid approach for this domain."

This thesis makes a contribution to Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) architectures. A new intelligent tutoring system is presented for the domain of solving linear equations. This system is novel, because it is the first intelligent equation-solving tutor that combines a cognitive model of the domain with a model of dialog-based tutoring. The tutorial model is novel because it is based on the observation of an experienced human tutor and captures tutorial strategies specific to the domain of equation-solving. In this context, a tutorial dialog is the equivalent of breaking down problems into simpler steps and then asking new questions to the student before proceeding to the next navigational step. The resulting system, named E-tutor, was compared, via a randomized controlled experiment, to an algebra ITS similar to the“Cognitive Tutor" by Carnegie Learning, Inc®. The Cognitive Tutor can provide traditional model-tracing feedback and buggy messages to students, but does not engage students in dialog. Preliminary results using a very small sample size, i.e., teaching equation solving to 15 high school students, showed that E-Tutor with dialog capabilities performed better than E-tutor without dialog. This result showed an effect size of 0.4 standard deviations for overall learning by condition. This set of preliminary results, though not statistically significant, shows promising opportunities to improve learning performance by adding tutorial dialog capabilities to ITSs. However, significant further validation is required, specifically, adding greater numbers and variations of the work to our sample size, before this approach can be deemed successful. The system is available at www.wpi.edu/~leenar/E-tutor.

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1992. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 113-114). Also available in print.

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