Whereas schools typically record mounds of data regarding student performance, attendance, and other behaviors over the course of a school year, rarely is that data consulted and used to inform day-to-day instructional practice in the classroom. As teachers come under increasing pressure to ensure success for all of their students, we are attempting to provide tools to help teachers make sense of what is happening in their classrooms and take appropriate proactive and/or remedial action. One such tool is a Web service we've dubbed the Classroom Sentinel. The Classroom Sentinel mines electronic gradebook and other student information system data sources to detect critical teaching and learning patterns and bring those patterns to the attention of the teacher in the form of timely alerts. In this paper, we introduce the notion of classroom patterns, present some examples, and describe a framework for alert generation and delivery.

We are building a collaborative learning environement that supports teams of students as they collaborate synchronously and remotely to solve situated, multi-step problems involving algebraic modeling. Our system, named Algebra Jam, provides a set of tools to help students overcome two of the most serious impediments to successful collaboration: establishing common ground and maintaining group focus. These tools include tethered and untethered modes of operation including discrepancy notification, a goal-oriented team blackboard, object-oriented chat with collabicons, reification of problem solving roles, and the optional inclusion of a tutor agent as a virtual team participant. The tutor agent not only offers help and feedback on problem solving actions but also accumulates evidence about individual and group problem solving performance in a Bayesian inference network. The system is envisioned as a testbed for developing theories of teaming.

We describe the Smalltalk Gurus, components of the MoleHill intelligent tutoring system for Smalltalk programming. The Gurus offer help on plans for achieving goals in the Smalltalk environment, as well as remediation for students' incorrect and less-than-optimal plans. The Gurus' assistance is provided via the multimodal media of animation and voice-over audio. MoleHill employs multiple Gurus to deliver advice and instruction concerning disparate information domains, thus facilitating learners' cognitive organization and assimilation of new knowledge and information. We have labelled the approach instantiated by the Smalltalk Gurus the guru instructional model, one which is generally applicable to computer-based advisory systems.

Em irical usability evaluations (particularly forrna~ive J ev uations [13]) hinge on observing and interpreting critical incidents [8] of use.We proposed [3,5] augmenting critical incident methods by analysis of what we called critical threads: sets of causally related user episodes that, taken together, define major usability themes.This paper extents this work to the comparative usability analysis of a related artifact.We discuss how our earlier claims analysis was used to orient and simplify our current evaluation efforts.

No abstract available.

Two experiments studied the acquisition and transfer of text-editing skill. The first experiment, originally reported in Singley and Anderson (1985) but reanalyzed in greater detail here, found nearly total transfer between two similar line editors and partial transfer from the line editors to a screen editor. Analyses of the keystroke data revealed that the majority of the improvement during both learning and transfer was concentrated in the planning components of the skill. The second experiment found little evidence for negative transfer between a pair of screen editors designed for maximal interference using a classic interference paradigm. The few instances of negative transfer observed were better characterized as the positive transfer of nonoptimal methods rather than instances of true procedural interference. These results support an identical elements model of transfer based on a production system representation of cognitive skill. The relative magnitudes of transfer observed were consistent with detailed measures of production system overlap. In addition, localized transfer sites were hypothesized and identified through a series of microanalyses. Finally, specific transfer predictions based on the differential practice of general and specific components were tested and confirmed.