In modern educational technology we have the ability to capture click-stream interaction data from a student as they work on educational problems within an online environment. This provides us with an opportunity to identify student behaviours within the data (captured by the online environment) that are predictive of student success or failure. The constraints that exist within an educational setting provide the ability to associate these student behaviours to specific educational outcomes. This information could be then used to inform environments that support student learning while improving a student’s metacognitive skills. In this dissertation, we describe how reading behaviour clusters were extracted in an experiment in which students were embedded in a learning environment where they read documents and answered questions. We tracked their keystroke level behaviour and then applied clustering techniques to find pedagogically meaningful clusters. The key to finding these clusters were categorizing the questions as to their level in Bloom’s educational taxonomy: different behaviour patterns predicted success and failure in answering questions at various levels of Bloom. The clusters found in the first experiment were confirmed through two further experiments that explored variations in the number, type, and length of documents and the kinds of questions asked. In the final experiment, we also went beyond the actual keystrokes and explored how the pauses between keystrokes as a student answers a question can be utilized in the process of determining student success. This research suggests that it should be possible to diagnose learner behaviour even in “ill-defined” domains like reading. It also suggests that Bloom’s taxonomy can be an important (even necessary) input to such diagnosis.

Deaths among the pediatric population encompass a small percentage of the total number of fatalities across the United States. Since the deaths of infants, children, and adolescents are rare, there is little forensic literature concerning this age group. Autopsies, if performed completely, can reveal additional information surrounding circumstances of a case and leads to a determination of a cause of death or a diagnosis of exclusion. Yet studies report that nationwide autopsy rates are low, despite an increase of drugs in the environment and the prevalence of ill-defined causes of death. With the use of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) internet database Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER), all deaths of individuals 19 years old and under were analyzed for years 2000, 2005, and 2010. The three main areas that were examined through the WONDER database were poisoning deaths for all ages, ill-defined causes of death for the infant age group, and overall autopsy rates for the three age groups with the highest crude rate of death. The crude death rate for all pediatric age groups have decreased within the examined decade. The infant age group comprised the majority of all pediatric fatalities and had the highest crude death rate. Individuals in the 15 to 19 year age group had the second highest crude death rate of the pediatric population. With a low number of total pediatric poisoning deaths, there has been a steady increase in crude death rate over the decade. The 15-19 age group encompassed the majority of these types of fatalities, with a total of 942 in 2010. It was also discovered that not every pediatric victim was autopsied when a death was diagnosed as a poisoning death when examined by a forensic pathologist. Infant ill-defined causes of death consisted of just over 12% nationwide for all years studied. However approximately 70% of all infant ill-defined causes of death were diagnosed as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in 2000 and 2010. When examining autopsy rates for the year 2010, autopsies were performed for 32.9% of infant deaths, 55.1% of child deaths between 1-4 years of age, and 59.8% of teenage deaths between 15-19 years of age. In 2010, implementation of autopsies is uncertain for 2,454 deaths under 1 year, 255 deaths between 1 and 4 years, and 666 between 15 and 19 years. Measures need to be put in place nationwide to increase the rate of autopsies for the pediatric population and there needs to be strict accountability when it is not reported on a death certificate whether or not an autopsy was performed. Standard operating procedures should be applied for all autopsies of pediatric victims, with a toxicology examination always being included in an investigation.

BACKGROUND:Heart failure is sometimes incorrectly listed as the underlying cause of death (UCD) on death certificates, thus compromising the accuracy and comparability of mortality statistics. Statistical redistribution of the UCD has been used to examine the effect of misclassification of the UCD attributed to heart failure, but sex- and race-specific redistribution of deaths on coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality in the United States has not been examined.METHODS:We used coarsened exact matching to infer the UCD of vital records with heart failure as the UCD from 1999 to 2010 for decedents 55years old and older from states encompassing regions under surveillance by the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study (Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, and North Carolina). Records with heart failure as the UCD were matched on decedent characteristics (five-year age groups, sex, race, education, year of death, and state) to records with heart failure listed among the multiple causes of death. Each heart failure death was then redistributed to plausible UCDs proportional to the frequency among matched records.RESULTS:After redistribution the proportion of deaths increased for CHD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, hypertensive heart disease, and cardiomyopathy, P<0.001. The percent increase in CHD mortality after redistribution was the highest in Mississippi (12%) and lowest in Maryland (1.6%), with variations by year, race, and sex. Redistribution proportions for CHD were similar to CHD death classification by a panel of expert reviewers in the ARIC study.CONCLUSIONS:Redistribution of ill-defined UCD would improve the accuracy and comparability of mortality statistics used to allocate public health resources and monitor mortality trends.

This thesis is an inquiry that documents, identifies and assesses the effectiveness, circumstances, and potential resources related to addressing the gap between social needs and higher education as stated in the National Development Strategy 2011-2016. The aim of the thesis is to evaluate the response of the students on the collaborative, human-centered, result-oriented aspects of design thinking while addressing the eating experience topic, an articulated theme from the wicked problem of obesity. The eating experience theme provided students from design, business and engineering majors a contextualized topic to test design thinking in a series of workshops conducted in three different universities. Quantitative research methods were used to test the students’ feedback on design thinking, map their reactions during the process and rate the workshops. The later served as a recruitment channel to bring interested students from design, business and engineering majors in a last workshop. Participants develop one of the previously generated seed concepts and reflect on the multi-disciplinary experience. Results have shown that students successfully articulated the method, focused on the user-needs, collaborated with each other and generated tangible seed concepts to address the social topic. The interior design students assessed the method with an average rating. They were the least comfortable with the ambiguity level of the topic and with the user-centered approach of design thinking. Whereas the engineering and business students rated the method with high scores and were comfortable in the workshops. Furthermore, 22% of the students involved in the study were interested to enroll in the last multi-disciplinary workshop yet 5% participated due to their workload and the lack of incentives. In conclusion, the inquiry engaged students in a transformative academic experience that impacted their cognitive and ethical capacity. It also revealed new opportunities that can bridge the gap between higher education and social needs.

This body of research focuses on supporting problem-stakeholders, decision-makers and problem-solvers faced with an ill-defined and complex real world problem. An ill-defined problem has a characteristic trait of continual refinement. That is, the definition of the problem changes throughout the problem investigation and resolution process. The central theme of this research is that a support system should provide problem stakeholders with a problem definition model for constructing and manipulating a representation of the definition of the problem as they understand it. The approach adopted herein is to first develop a problem definition model for ill-defined problems— the 6-Component problem definition model. With this model, it is then possible to move on to identifying the types of changes or modifications to the problem definition that problem stakeholders, decision makers and problem solvers may wish to explore. Importantly, there must be a connection between the surface representation of the problem and the underlying implementation of the support system. This research argues that by focusing the support system around the problem definition, it is possible to reduce the mismatch between the problem objectives and the representation of the problem that the support system offers. This research uses the Unified Modelling Language to record and explore the requirements that problem stakeholders, faced with an evolving problem definition, place on a support system. The 6-Component problem definition model is then embedded within a design for an evolutionary support system. This embedding, supported by collaboration diagrams, shows how a system using the 6-Component problem definition model will support stakeholders in their exploration, evaluation and resolution of an ill-defined and complex real-world problem. A case study provides validation of the effectiveness of the 6-Component problem definition model proposed and developed in this work. The case study uses the 6-Component problem definition model as a basis for implementing the Integration Workbench, an evolutionary support system for land-use planning. Stakeholders explore, communicate, evaluate and resolve the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement problem with assistance from the Integration Workbench.

Building technology to support students who must learn ethics and social issues is a difficult problem. In fact ethics and social issues is an example of an ill-defined domains, which typically are resistant to standard intelligent tutoring systems techniques. An analysis of current pedagogical tools for teaching Computer Science ethics and social issues using Bloom’s Taxonomy shows that the task needs tools for achieving Application, Evaluation and Creation educational goals. One promising approach which has the potential to achieve such goals is educational games. This paper explores a proof of concept educational game called Conundrum. This serious game provides three ways for learners to interact with it, each supporting a level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. An experiment was run in a Computer Science ethics and social issues class showing promising results that the design of Conundrum led to students achieving Application, Evaluation and Creation goals. A multidimensional student model was also developed to aid instructors and learners understand their progress. The experiment showed that the design of Conundrum did have some good aspects but leaves a lot of future work to maximize its potential.

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Intelligent tutoring systems and computer-supported collaborative environments have been designed to enhance human learning in various domains. While a number of solid techniques have been developed in the Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) field to foster human learning in fundamental science domains, there is still a lack of evidence about how to support learning in so-called ill-defined domains that are characterized by the absence of formal domain theories, uncertainty about best solution strategies and teaching practices, and learners' answers represented through text and argumentation. This dissertation investigates how to support students' learning in the ill-defined domain of professional ethics through a computer-based learning system. More specifically, it examines how to support students in the analysis of case studies, which is a common pedagogical practice in the ethics domain. This dissertation describes our design considerations and a resulting system called Umka. In Umka learners analyze case studies individually and collaboratively that pose some ethical or professional dilemmas. Umka provides various types of support to learners in the analysis task. In the individual analysis it provides various kinds of feedback to arguments of learners based on predefined system knowledge. In the collaborative analysis Umka fosters learners' interactions and self-reflection through system suggestions and a specifically designed visualization. The system suggestions offer learners the chance to consider certain helpful arguments of their peers, or to interact with certain helpful peers. The visualization highlights similarities and differences between the learners' positions, and illustrates the learners' level of acceptance of each other's positions. This dissertation reports on a series of experiments in which we evaluated the effectiveness of Umka's support features, and suggests several research contributions. Through this work, it is shown that despite the ill-definedness of the ethics domain, and the consequent complications of text processing and domain modelling, it is possible to build effective tutoring systems for supporting students' learning in this domain. Moreover, the techniques developed through this research for the ethics domain can be readily expanded to other ill-defined domains, where argument, qualitative analysis, metacognition and interaction over case studies are key pedagogical practices.

This represents a proof-of-concept study of the appropriateness of vibrational and NMR spectroscopy for predicting the molecular structure of large molecules on the basis of a library of small molecules. Density Functional Theory (DFT) B3LYP/6-311G was used generate all spectra. 20 model compounds comprising two multiple-ringed polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) connected by varying aliphatic chain-lengths were investigated. A least squares optimization algorithm was developed to determine the contribution of molecular subunits in the model compounds. 1H and 13C NMR spectroscopy failed to identify subunits unambiguously even with a constrained library. By contrast, IR and Raman results independently identified 40% and 65% respectively and jointly more than 80 % of the aromatic groups present; however, the aliphatic chain-length was poorly defined in general. IR and Raman spectroscopy are a suitable basis for spectral decomposition and should play a greater role in the identification of ringed subunits present in ill-defined hydrocarbons / Chemical Engineering

Esta dissertação trata das características próprias dos problemas de projeto de desenvolvimento de produtos. Os objetivos deste trabalho foram revisar parte da literatura publicada sobre a natureza dos problemas de projeto; confirmar, na prática, a mudança na definição dos componentes do problema ao longo da sua resolução; e propor uma estrutura que auxilie a escolha de ferramentas de geração de alternativas. São apresentados os resultados de uma observação do processo projetual realizado por estudantes de graduação da Engenharia e do Design, trabalhando conjuntamente. A dissertação é estruturada na forma de três artigos encadeados. Os resultados da revisão bibliográfica conformam o primeiro artigo, referente ao capítulo dois deste documento. A observação dos grupos de estudantes está no segundo artigo, referente ao capítulo três. A contribuição busca facilitar a tradução dos requisitos de um projeto em conceitos de um produto, através da proposição de uma matriz que cruza as dimensões dos problemas de projeto de produtos manufaturados industrialmente e algumas ferramentas conhecidas para a geração de alternativas. Essa matriz se encontra no terceiro artigo, referente ao capítulo quatro do documento. No quinto e último capítulo são elaboradas as conclusões do estudo, que apontam para a recursividade da atividade de definir um problema paralelamente ao seu processo de resolução. / This study is about the nature of design problems. Its objectives are: to review part of the literature about the topic; to confirm, with empirical basis, the changes in the components of design problem through the resolution process; and present a framework that helps choosing concept generating tools. The empirical data were obtained from observation and verbal protocols of graduation students from Engineering and Design courses working together. This research is presented in three linked articles, setting chapters two, three and four of this document. Chapter two represents the literature review. The observation of the students corresponds to chapter three. The contribution appears in chapter four, where the design problem dimensions are crossed with tools for concept generation. Lastly, in the fifth chapter, the conclusions pointed out to the recursiveness in the problem definition and solution generation process.