Supporting Students in the Analysis of Case Studies for Ill-Defined Domains

Abstract

Computer science students often must take a professional ethics course, but sometimes find the qualitative nature of such a course to be challenging. To this end, we have built a prototype system called Umka that helps such learners in analyzing the case studies commonly used in this kind of course by : (i) directly critiquing (with various kinds of feedback) the arguments of a learner about issues that arise in a case study; and (ii) supporting collaboration among multiple learners as they discuss these issues. The key technology underlying Umka is the use of latent semantic analysis (LSA) augmented with the structured interface for the ”diagnosis” of students’ arguments. Umka was tested in a proof-of-concept experiment, in which we assessed the accuracy of the LSA technique in diagnosing a learner’s argument, and explored the pedagogical effectiveness of the support provided by Umka for various types of learners. Preliminary conclusions are drawn that are promising, and further experiments are planned in the future. It is the longer term goal of our research to develop techniques that can be used to create tools to support learners in a number of ill-defined educational domains.