M.Ed. / With transformation in higher education institutions in South Africa, writing centres were established in the early 1990s to cater for the diverse educational, social and cultural needs of students. Transformation and the call for teachers to become lifelong learners, has motivated many mature professionals to enter postgraduate study. The Faculty of Education’s Postgraduate Writing Support Centre at the University of Johannesburg was established in 2002 to offer writing support to such students. Through a multi-faceted case study, this paper explores the importance of collaborative conversations within a community of student writers in constructing knowledge. It seeks through the narrative of three different tutoring contexts, to understand the role of the peer tutor in facilitating these conversations with postgraduates in support of their writing. The findings of this study suggest to faculty that a tutor training programme needs to be developed to ensure effective and successful writing support, and in addition the postgraduate programme should be reviewed to incorporate support and continued supervision through all stages of study. / Mr. W.A. Janse van Rensburg

The ASSISTment system is a web-based tutor that is currently being used as an eighth and tenth-grade mathematics in both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. This system represents its tutors as state-based "pseudo-tutors" which mimic a more complex cognitive tutor based on a set of production rules. It has been shown that building pseudo-tutors significantly decreases the time spent authoring content. This is an advantage for authoring systems such as the ASSITment builder, though it sacrifices greater expressive power and flexibility. A cognitive tutor models a student's behavior with general logical rules. Through model-tracing of a cognitive tutor's rule space, a system can find the reasons behind a student action and give better tutoring. In addition, these cognitive rules are general and can be used for many different tutors. It is the goal of this thesis to provide the architecture for using cognitive rule-based tutors in the ASSITment system. A final requirement is that running these computationally intensive model-tracing tutors do not slow down students using the pseudo-tutors, which represents the majority of ASSISTment usage. This can be achieved with remote computation, realized with SOAP web services. The system was further extended to allow the creation and implementation of user-level experiments within the system. These experiments allow the testing of pedagogical choices. We implemented a hint dissuasion experiment to test this experimental framework and provide those results.

This thesis focuses on two research questions: 1. What is the impact of Barnardos� Tutoring Program on the students involved? 2. How has the program influenced the parents, teachers and tutors? In examining the literature I have identified a complex set of dynamics that affects students� school performance. The themes of relevance to this study are: the concept of disadvantage and poverty; the role of literacy and numeracy in educational attainment; the importance of social acceptance for student well-being; aspects of mentoring and tutoring, and issues related to homework. In this study I examine the degree to which a tutor�s involvement improves students� homework performance, literacy and numeracy, social skills and engagement with school. I also examine how the tutoring program enhances parents� involvement with their children�s education. And I assess the tutors� contribution, the influence of the program on the teachers, and the implications for the program. My methods involved sending questionnaires out to 44 teachers, 41 students, 40 parents and 44 tutors. I also interviewed seven students under 10 years old. In addition to the questionnaires, I interviewed a core group of parents, students, teachers and tutors who had been involved with the program since 1999 (six tutors, five students, five parents and four teachers). My findings indicate that homework places considerable strain on students who do not have adequate resources or support available to them, in their homes, to undertake their homework tasks. Tutoring programs which take place outside of the school environment and which are based on the one-to-one principle of mentoring programs offer considerable benefits to students and their families. The study indicates that the tutoring program has brought about significant changes to the homes and the lives of the students. These changes include a greater engagement with learning and an increased interest in school. The students also have better relationships with their peers and feel that they are valued members of their class. The parents believe that they have the support that they need and as a result there is less tension in the home with regard to homework. The study also suggests that although the main role of the tutors is to help at-risk students with their homework and schoolwork, their role is much more diverse.

Over the past several decades, many K-12 classes have moved to use open, inquiry-based approaches to science instruction; research has shown some benefits from these approaches. However, there also exist significant challenges in teaching scientific modeling and inquiry, some based on their nature as metacognitive skills and others based on the general difficulty in providing guided instruction in open-ended exploratory learning contexts. To address these challenges, this dissertation presents a metacognitive tutoring system that teaches students an authentic process of inquiry-driven scientific modeling within an exploratory science learning environment. The design of the metacognitive tutoring system is informed by the literature on the process of scientific modeling and inquiry in both education and science, and it draws from AI theories of metacognition and intelligent tutoring. The tutoring system monitors the performance of teams of students in an open inquiry task in ecology. The system provides feedback on demand about how well the team is doing in investigating and explaining the system, and it also intervenes when errors in the process are observed or when new abilities are demonstrated. To evaluate this system, a controlled experiment was conducted with 237 students in a middle school life science classroom. In one condition, teams of students completed the activity without the tutoring system enabled, while in the other condition teams interacted with the tutoring system during part of their inquiry and modeling process. Evaluations of this experiment have shown that students who interact with the tutoring system improved in their attitudes toward scientific inquiry and careers in science, and that teams that interact with the tutoring system generate better explanations of ecological phenomena.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

One of the greatest problems facing researchers in the sub field of Artificial Intelligence known as Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) is the selection of a knowledge base designs that will facilitate the modification of the knowledge base. The Class-Entity-Relationship-Attribute (CERA), proposed by R. P. Brazile, holds certain promise as a more generic knowledge base design framework upon which can be built robust and efficient ITS. This study has a twofold purpose. The first is to demonstrate that a CERA knowledge base can be constructed for an ITS on a subset of the domain of Cretaceous paleontology and function as the "expert module" of the ITS. The second is to test the validity of the ideas that students guided through a lesson learn more factual knowledge, while those who explore the knowledge base that underlies the lesson through query at their own pace will be able to formulate their own integrative knowledge from the knowledge gained in their explorations and spend more time on the system. This study concludes that a CERA-based system can be constructed as an effective teaching tool. However, while an ITS - treatment provides for statistically significant gains in achievement test scores, the type of treatment seems not to matter as much as time spent on task. This would seem to indicate that a query-based system which allows the user to progress at their own pace would be a better type of system for the presentation of material due to the greater amount of on-line computer time exhibited by the users.

Tutoring services have experienced exponential increases in enrollment in Canada, with Ontario alone witnessing a 60% increase in enrollment from 1996 to 2000 (see Aurini & Davies, 2004). While Canadian research has documented organizational changes (Aurini & Davies, 2004; Aurini, 2006) and parents’ motives to enroll in tutoring services (Davies, 2004; Gale, 2016), the lived experiences of students with tutoring services are notably absent from the literature to date. In response, the current study investigates the experiences of high school students receiving math tutoring services (n =3) and their parents (n =2). The extent to which their participation in tutoring demonstrates “transboundary learning” (Kim & Jung, 2019b) is also examined in response to claims that tutoring services represent mainly peripheral learning environments as opposed to a core part of students’ learning (Aurini & Davies, 2013). Guided by a poststructuralism theoretical framework, the study employs qualitative methods to respond to three questions: (1) What are the lived experiences of high school students receiving math tutoring from a private tutoring service in Ottawa (Ontario, Canada)? (2) What are parents’ motives for seeking private tutoring services? and (3) How do participants perceive the learning taking place in different environments (e.g., tutoring vs. school)? Data from semi-structured interviews with high school students and their parents are analyzed using thematic analysis and interpreted using a Transboundary Learning framework (Kim & Jung, 2019b). Findings reveal key characteristics of transboundary learning in participants’ math tutoring contexts, suggesting a shift in the relationship between tutoring and schooling from peripheral to transboundary learning, whereby, tutoring is not regarded as peripheral as it has been in the literature to date. These findings are discussed in light of the noteworthy influence of tutoring over students' learning and schooling, and the potential for more inequalities in education.

This dissertation consists of two articles. The first article describes an architecture for intelligent tutoring that focuses on modularity. This new architecture is based on Gibbons' layers theory for instructional design (2014). Splitting up the architecture for an intelligent tutor into layers allows different pieces to age at different rates which, in turn, allows the intelligent tutor to be adapted to new research and design theories. This architecture supports building intelligent tutoring services, nimble programs that can be assembled together to replicate the functions of intelligent tutoring without the expertise needed to create the services. Alternative architectures support building intelligent tutoring systems, monolithic programs that are less amenable to change and require immense expertise. The second article provides a proof of concept for the first services created under the layers theory. These two services create the building blocks of a domain and comprise one part of the content layer as described in the first article. The first service focuses on the task of key concept extraction whereas the second service focuses on prerequisite relationship extraction. These two tasks can provide the structure of the domain, particularly when it comes to domains that are more declarative in nature rather than procedural.

No description available.

This research explores the possibility of a relationship between students’ learning approach and attendance to private supplementary tutoring. The phenomenon of private supplementary tutoring is prevalent in Hong Kong because of the public examination at the end of senior secondary. There have been numerous researches on private supplementary tutoring in Hong Kong. However there has not been any research relating private supplementary tutoring to learning approach. The research was done using mixed method. For qualitative data Kember, Biggs and Leung’s (2004) Revised Learning Process Questionnaire (R-LPQ-2F) was used to identify student’s learning approach. For quantitative date a semi-structured interview was used, containing questions pertaining to learning approach of students. The result of the research was that there was not a strong relationship between students’ learning approach and attendance in private tutorial center. This is due to the fact that learning approach of students is a dynamic entity and is not stagnant. External and internal factors affect students’ learning approach. Therefore learning approach does not seem to have a strong relationship to attendance to a private tutorial center. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education