The study explores the potential of the research-Teaching nexus in a peer-Tutoring setting. During the Fall semester of 2016, students in an Information Systems course worked collaboratively on domain topics, assigned to them by the teacher and created educational material for their fellow students. Students' tutoring role was concluding with a class presentation and a discussion session in each course lecture. The study focuses on students' perspectives in the collaborating groups and the audience and analyzes how learning strategies in self-regulation, peer learning, and help seeking affect students' experiences during group work. Analysis of student activity revealed four distinct patterns of collaboration. Findings suggest that students that rely more on group members for help were less satisfied by the communication among them. However, students were in general satisfied with their collaboration, being able to adapt the activity to their needs. Similarly, the teacher and the audience (students attending the student-Tutoring sessions) evaluated positively students' performance as teachers.

The study analyzes the potential of different feedback metrics that could improve learning in quiz-based activities. For five consecutive weeks, a group of 91 sophomore students started their classes on Information Systems with a short multiple-choice quiz. The quiz activity was organized into three phases: (a) provide initial response to the questions, (b) view feedback on class activity and revise initial responses, and (c) discuss correct answers and class performance with the teacher. The feedback included information on the percentage of students that selected each choice, on students' self-reported levels of preparation, and their, also self-reported, confidence that their initial responses were correct. The students used an online quiz tool that was developed for the study and were randomly distributed into four groups, according to the type of feedback they received (only percentage; percentage & confidence; percentage & preparation; percentage, confidence, & preparation). Result analysis revealed that students were relying first and foremost on the percentage metric, even in cases where a wrong answer had the highest percentage value. However, statistical analysis also revealed a significant main effect for confidence and preparation metrics in questions where the percentage metric was ambiguous (i.e., several choices with high percentages).

This paper presents nine educational games and activities for learning the Arabic language. The games are developed for Arabiyyatii project, a three-year endeavor that involves re-conceptualization of the curriculum of standard Arabic as a first language in kindergarten. The applications presented in this paper are developed on tabletop surface computers that support a collaborative and interactive learning environment. These applications focus on speaking drills, word production, and sentence recognition of Modern Standard Arabic. This work incorporates an interdisciplinary research framework exploiting best practices used from related disciplines namely: computer-supported collaborative learning, language learning, teaching and learning pedagogy, instructional design and scaffolding.

This paper presents initial evaluation regarding the use of simple educational games on tabletop surface computers to teach Kindergarten students in Qatar the Arabic alphabet. This effort is part of the “Arabiyyatii” research project, a 3-year endeavor aimed to teach 5-year-olds Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The paper describes a naturalistic study design, following the activities of 18 students for a period of 9 weeks in the project. All students were native speakers of the Qatari dialect and they were early users of similar surface technologies. The paper presents three of the games available to the students, along with data collected from system log files and class observations. Result analysis suggests that these kinds of games could be useful in (a) enhancing students’ engagement in language learning, (b) increasing their exposure to MSA, and (c) developing their vocabulary.

The paper explores the potential of usage and ranking information in increasing student engagement in a double-blinded peer review setting, where students are allowed to select freely which/how many peer works to review. The study employed 56 volunteering sophomore students majoring in Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering. We performed a controlled experiment, grouping students into 3 study conditions: control, usage data, usage and ranking data. Students in the control condition did not receive additional information. Students in the next two conditions were able to see their usage data (logins, peer work viewed/reviewed, etc.), while students in the last group could additionally see their ranking in their group according to their usage data. Results showed that while the three groups were comparable, a range of different attitudes were visible in the Ranking group. Students with more positive attitude towards ranking were more engaged and outperformed their fellow students in their group.

This paper presents initial results regarding writing activities in the context of the ALADDIN project. The goal of the project is to teach Modern Standard Arabic in 5-year-old kindergarten students in Qatar. A total of 18 students, enrolled in the ‘Arabic Class’, participated for 9 weeks in the activities of the project. All students were native speakers of the Qatari dialect. Learning activities involved both typical instructional methods, and the use of specifically designed tools for tabletop surface computers. The paper focuses on writing activities and on how the affordances of surface computers affected students’ performance and attitude towards the Arabic class and, consequently, the Arabic language.

This paper focuses on the effect that usage data and group ranking information may have when are presented to students in a peer review setting. The study analyzes the performance and attitudes of 56 sophomore students enrolled in a Network Planning and Design course. The students, grouped randomly in three different conditions, followed the prescriptions of a free-selection peer review protocol that guided students in double-blind review process, allowing them to select on their own peer work for review. Students in the first condition acted as the control group without any information on their usage data or rankings. Students in the second condition had access to usage data information mirroring their activity in the study, while students in the third condition received additional information on their rankings inside their group. Result analysis suggests that, while there is not difference in domain knowledge acquisition, engagement was higher in the third group, with students spending more time in the activity and expressing a more positive attitude towards the study.

This study presents how the degree of script coercion can affect the learning outcome in a setting for computer-supported collaborative learning. In the study, 42 junior students majoring in Informatics were randomly assigned into two study conditions: High Coercion (n=22), and Low Coercion (n=20). Initially, students worked individually, studying material and answering ill-structured problems on the Software Project Management domain in a technology-enhanced learning environment. Next, students worked in pairs reviewing each other's answers, following a review microscript. Eventually, the students had to collaborate and agree on a final common answer. Post-test result analysis showed that students obligated to submit their review comments as deliverables back into the learning environment (High Coercion) far surpassed those for whom review submission as deliverables was optional. This outcome is in line with studies emphasizing that learning is improved when technology tools require that learners make their thinking explicit.

This paper presents design guidelines for implementing a free-selection peer review protocol. "Free-selection" (FS) refers to the ability of students freely access all available peer work and choose which of them to read and review. A series of two studies on the free-selection protocol has provided evidence on the efficiency of the method. In the First study, the FS protocol was compared against the widely used assigned-pair (AP) one, where students work in instructor-defined dyads. In the Second study, further issues of the FS approach were evaluated, with our attention focused on students who, due to the freedom element of the protocol, do not receive reviews. Both studies paint a very promising picture of free-selection. However, several issues were also raised on how to effectively apply such a protocol. As the use of technology is necessary in the FS approach, we provide in this paper the design implications derived from the two studies regarding various aspects of the protocol.

Software project management (SPM) is an ill-structured domain, where past experiences of project management can become valuable learning resources for novices. To support instruction in the domain, we have developed the eCASE-SPM Web environment, for engaging students in case-based instruction and help them develop SPM related problem solving skills. This work presents major design issues of the environment and initial research results regarding (a) a student-based evaluation, connecting also students' attitudes to their learning styles, and (b) the learning effectiveness of the environment, investigating the use of embedded question prompts as students' cognitive scaffolds. Results so far reveal interesting interactions between students' learning styles and their attitudes towards learning in the eCASE-SPM environment. Furthermore, there is strong indication that using question prompts may have beneficial effect on students' learning and problem solving abilities, although fading out of the scaffolding should be implemented to moderate students' workload.

Case-based learning is expected to enhance students' awareness of the various contextual factors, which affect problem solving in ill structured domains. An interesting question is always how to engage students in efficient processing of the case-based learning material. In this paper, we present the design and preliminary evaluation results of the eCASE environment, a generic Web-based environment for supporting case-based instruction. eCASE allows instructors to develop appropriate study paths for students to criss-cross the case-based information landscape. Furthermore, it supports students' study by providing scripts, which scaffold them when processing the learning material. A script in eCASE models the cognitive processes related to context awareness and guides students to focus on important events, recall relative cases and reach useful conclusions. First evaluation results indicate that students acknowledge the learning efficiency of scripted material. However, design improvements are also necessary to make scripts more appealing and less monotonous for students