Academic usage of COMSOL for student use has only begun in the last five years at USNA. Student involvement comes in four types, course-wide usage, focused course related work, student projects and semester-long research projects. A summary of how COMSOL has been successfully used at USNA will be given, showing examples of student work, with topics ranging from acoustics, fluid dynamics, pde so...

At most Canadian and American community colleges and universities, student ratings have been implemented as a means of evaluating course instruction. Although concerns regarding the validity of student ratings from instructors’ perspectives have been studied quite extensively, issues associated with the use of student ratings information by administrators have been largely ignored. In this stud...

While some recent work in tutorial dialogue has touched upon tutor reformulations of student contributions, there has not yet been an attempt to characterize the intentions of reformulations in this educational context nor an attempt to determine which types of reformulation actually contribute to student learning. In this paper we take an initial look at tutor reformulations of student contrib...

This paper describes work carried out to explore the role of a learning companion as a teachable student of the human student. A LCS for Binary Boolean Algebra has been developed to explore the hypothesis that a learning companion with less expertise than the human student would be beneficial if the student taught it. The system implemented two companions with different expertise and two types ...

This paper first shows that when colleges’ preferences are substitutable there does not exist any stable matching mechanism that makes truthful revelation of preferences a dominant strategy for every student. The paper introduces student types and captures colleges’ preferences for affirmative action via type-specific quotas: A college always prefers a set of students that respects its type-spe...

This paper reports a new approach to coaching collaboration in a synchronous distance learning context. Prior work on supporting collaboration has relied largely on comparing student discourse to models of collaborative discourse. Comparison of student work to expert solutions is prevalent in individual coaching paradigms. Although these approaches are valuable, our approach evaluates the poten...

In computer science and information technology education, instructors often use electronic tools to collect, compile, execute, and analyze student assignments. The assessment results produced by these tools provide a large body of data about student work habits, the quality of student work, and the areas where students are struggling. This paper reports on efforts to extract significantly more ...