Eureka:  A Tool for Specifying and Finding Significant Moments in Learning


Steve Tanimoto

Description:

This tool consists of three parts: an editor, an applicator, and a reporter.  The editor supports the specification of significant events in learning through combinations of patterns and predicates.  The applicator compares actual student data logs with the patterns and it computes the predicates and combines their results, determining the extent to which subsequences of events in the database match the specified patterns.  The reporter uses patterns and results of application to create reports to the user about the occurrences of the patterns, including any significant learning moments found.

Pattern language:

Significant moments in learning might be characterized by points in time surrounded by particular types of events that indicate something important has happened.  A pattern language must provide the elements for representing the events and their relationships. Important parts of the language are the following:

  1. means to specify regions of the curriculum (e.g., lessons, activity sheets, specific goals students worked towards, or specific problems they were solving or questions they were answering).
  2. means to select events by type, student, time, and characteristics, including a means to write predicates that classify text or sketches.
  3. means to specify temporal (and other) relations including temporal precedence and constraints on time intervals: "Event Y took place within 120 seconds after event X."
  4. means to access student data such as answers to test questions, and messages posted to other students.
The editor permits a user to construct, modify, load and save collections of patterns, assign names to patterns, and to maintain status information about patterns.

The applicator permits a user to try out whole patterns or portions of patterns and receive feedback from the system regarding the syntactic validity of the patterns, the logical consistency of the patterns, and clues about the occurrence of the patterns in a given database.

The reporter creates reports that contain both textual explanations and graphical displays of the results of pattern application. Textual portions of the report explain the patterns that were successfully matched, using any comments associated with the patterns to assist in the explanation.  They also explain the results in terms of number of hits, strength of matches, and locations of matching within the database -- e.g., starting dates and times, names of students involved, names of curricular units involved, and a description of the kind of learning represented. The graphical portions of the report show the temporal relationships among the key components of the patterns as they occurred in the periods surrounding the significant moments in learning.