Design of Pedagogical Feedbacks in a Learning Environment for Object-Oriented Modeling

This paper describes the design of the pedagogical feedbacks in Diagram, a learning environment for UML object-oriented modeling. The project is rooted in several years of teaching practice and actual diagrams produced by novice students. Diagram is based upon an interaction framework that supports the learner’s metacognitive activity. It includes a diagnosis module which compares the student diagram with a reference diagram, and produces the list of the structural differences between these diagrams. We show that these structural differences can be mapped onto differences that are relevant from a pedagogical viewpoint. The differences that are noticed in the student diagram give rise to feedbacks of three kinds: indications, questions and suggestions. We illustrate the feedback elaboration process by giving an example of a student diagram with the diagnosis results and the messages generated by the learning environment.