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The purpose of this study is to develop an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for programming learning based on information tutoring feedback (ITF) to provide real-time guidance and feedback to self-directed learners during programming problem-solving and to improve learners’ computational thinking.

By analyzing the mechanism of action of ITF on the development of computational thinking, an ITF strategy and corresponding ITS acting on the whole process of programming problem-solving were developed to realize the evaluation of programming problem-solving ideas based on program logic. On the one hand, a lexical and syntactic analysis of the programming problem solutions input by the learners is performed and presented with a tree-like structure. On the other hand, by comparing multiple algorithms, it is implemented to compare the programming problem solutions entered by the learners with the answers and analyze the gaps to give them back to the learners to promote the improvement of their computational thinking.

This study clarifies the mechanism of the role of ITF-based ITS in the computational thinking development process. Results indicated that the ITS designed in this study is effective in promoting students’ computational thinking, especially for low-level learners. It also helped to improve students’ learning motivation, and reducing cognitive load, while there’s no significant difference among learners of different levels.

This study developed an ITS based on ITF to address the problem of learners’ difficulty in obtaining real-time guidance in the current programming problem-solving-based computational thinking development, providing a good aid for college students’ independent programming learning.

The on‐line tutor or e‐moderator faces a diversity of new challenges, including instructional design, organisation, direct instruction and facilitating discourse. This study aims to contrast the views of students and tutors regarding what factors constitute effective e‐moderation in order to identify key attributes of an on‐line tutor.

A qualitative methodology was adopted. The research utilised a semi‐structured interview technique to collect data contrasting and comparing the views of 35 students and 35 tutors on the constituents of effective e‐moderation.

The paper finds that from a student perspective the quality of feedback, student support and module management were key attributes of an effective e‐moderator. In contrast tutors argued that motivating students, including the provision of constructive feedback and developing an engaging on‐line persona were critical to successful e‐moderation. Comparison revealed that students and tutors have a broadly similar view to what constitutes effective on‐line moderation and any disparities related to how these groups tended to interact with the learning environment. Students were concerned primarily with how moderation enabled them to engage with the learning environment whereas tutors tended to discuss effective moderation in terms of factors that facilitated the learning process.

The study recognises the key attributes of an effective e‐moderator that should inform course design and tutor training.

The study aims to develop a comprehensive theoretical model to understand the relationship between feedback and individual creativity in a social learning context. To achieve the goal, the study unravels the mechanism underlying the relationship between evaluative feedback and creativity development and examines the interaction effects between informative feedback and evaluative feedback.

The study draws on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework to develop the research model. A laboratory experiment with a self-designed social learning platform was conducted to test the model. A total of 125 subjects participate in the experiment.

The empirical findings reveal that evaluative feedback affects creativity via intrinsic motivation and perceived feedback accuracy and informative feedback moderates the effects of negative feedback on intrinsic motivation and perceived feedback accuracy.

Organizations should be conscious of the role feedback plays in individual creativity development when building a social learning platform. Specifically, organizations can guide learners to provide favorable online feedback as well as train learners to cope with feedback effectively in creative tasks.

The study integrates feedback and creativity literature to propose three important mediators and examines the roles of the mediators in the process of creativity development in a social learning context, extending current understanding on the direct relationship between feedback and creativity. The study also complements the existing feedback literature by investigating the interactions between different types of peer feedback in the model of creativity development.

Simulation games have long been used as a teaching tool in the classroom environment mainly due to the high level of participation and engagement that students are able to generate from these, making the learning process more enjoyable and capable to replicate real-life scenarios. Feedback given during the simulation helps to motivate students to find better solutions to the problems being presented in the games and thus enhance their hands-on knowledge on particular subjects. The purpose of this research is to provide empirical evidence of interrelations and impacts that exist between real-time continuous feedback and simulation game performance as well as the interrelations and impacts that exist between real-time continuous feedback and both students' attitude and engagement towards learning.

The research focused on 60 undergraduate students enrolled at the Centre of Commerce at RMIT University Vietnam who had taken at least three semesters at various programmes. For test purposes, the research employed a 3D IBM business process management (BPM) simulation game, INNOV8 developed by the IBM Academic Initiative (more information about the game is available at: www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/index.html). A web-based survey followed at the university grounds for the collection of data.

Students showed a favourable attitude towards learning through the simulation game. In addition, the real-time continuous feedback given during the simulation game had a positive impact on the students' cognitive learning outcomes.

The sample size used was relatively small with 60 participants, most unfamiliar with the theories of BPM.

The originality of this research stems from the real-time and continuous nature of the feedback being given to students during the gameplay of a computer-based simulation game, and how this type of feedback could positively impact the students' learning outcomes.

Theoretical explanations for the diverse reactive feedback from secretarial employees in different career phases are relatively unexplored. However, research examining age differences in the impact of feedback suggests that the effects of performance feedback may differ for employees in the early career phase and employees in the late career phase. This paper aims to address this issue.

This contribution reports an experimental study on feedback perceptions and attribution by 173 secretarial employees of 12 Dutch organizations. Each participant responded to one of eight scenarios, which varied in terms of feedback content, sender status, and sender performance appraisal. Feedback perceptions were measured in terms of perceived fairness, acceptance, usefulness, willingness to improve and affect. An additional scale measured attribution.

The results reveal that elaborated specific feedback is perceived as more adequate, irrespective of feedback sender status and appraisal. Complex three-way interaction effects were found for educational level on affect and attribution, and for career phase on willingness to improve and affect. Low-educated employees reacted more strongly to supervisor feedback. Employees in the late career phase were more oriented towards the content of the feedback than feedback sender status, whereas the latter was of more concern for employees in the early and middle career phase.

In order for feedback to be considered as adequate, it is necessary to formulate the feedback as specific and as elaborated as possible. Employees in their late career phase especially react differently in comparison to employees in early and middle career phases. They are more inclined “to opt for quality” and appreciate elaborated feedback from a high experienced sender. Human resource managers should be aware of this in their policy towards employees in their late career phase

The present study shows that feedback content and sender characteristics (status and performance appraisal) differentially affect feedback perceptions and attribution. In addition, the study reveals that perceptions and attributions of performance feedback might be mediated by educational level and career phase.

How is it possible to evidence whether students are engaging with a course? What can be done to increase their level of engagement? Since the advent of blogs in 2002 a comprehensive body of research has developed around the pedagogic benefits of educational blogging and its value in teaching and learning, notably in encouraging reflective practice, social interaction and participatory learning (Burgess, 2006. Blogging to learn, learning to blog. In A. Bruns & J. Jacobs (Eds.), Uses of blogs (pp. 105–114). New York, NY: Peter Lang; Farmer, Yue, & Brooks, 2008; Williams & Jacobs, 2004). This chapter investigates whether blogs are also an effective tool for supporting and sustaining a community of learners in Higher Education and increasing their engagement in a university course.

The researchers used a case study methodology to examine whether the introduction of blogs had led to the development of a community of practice around an undergraduate course at the University for the Creative Arts. The data collected revealed that the course team had successfully developed a thriving online community involving students, staff, alumni and industry, with students displaying high levels of engagement and interaction. The discursive, commentary nature of blogging enabled students to engage in peer-supported learning, with the online ‘always on’ nature of the community providing a 24/7 support network. In addition, tutors were able to assess clearly the level of engagement of each student and provide targeted, timely feedback for those students who required more support.

It is hoped that this research will be informative to tutors and academic support staff who wish to explore the potential of using collaborative online technologies to enhance student learning and engagement.

Technology for training military teams has evolved through a convergence of advances in simulation technology for individual and collective training, methods for analyzing teamwork and designing training solutions, and intelligent tutoring technologies that adapt training to the student, to accelerate learning. A number of factors have slowed this evolution toward intelligent team tutoring systems (ITTS), including the challenges of processing communications data, which are the currency of teamwork, and the paucity of automated and generalizable measures of team work. Several systems fulfill a subset of the features required of an ITTS, namely the use of team training objectives, teamwork models, measures of teamwork, diagnostic capability, instructional strategies, and adaptation of training to team needs. We describe these systems: the Advanced Embedded Training System (AETS), Synthetic Cognition for Operational Team Training (SCOTT), the AWO Trainer, the Benchmarked Experiential System for Training (BEST), and the Cross-Platform Mission Visualization Tool. We close this chapter with recommendations for future research.

This chapter describes how conversational computer agents have been used in collaborative problem-solving environments. These agent-based systems are designed to (a) assess the students’ knowledge, skills, actions, and various other psychological states on the basis of the students’ actions and the conversational interactions, (b) generate discourse moves that are sensitive to the psychological states and the problem states, and (c) advance a solution to the problem. We describe how this was accomplished in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) in 2015. In the PISA CPS 2015 assessment, a single human test taker (15-year-old student) interacts with one, two, or three agents that stage a series of assessment episodes. This chapter proposes that this PISA framework could be extended to accommodate more open-ended natural language interaction for those languages that have developed technologies for automated computational linguistics and discourse. Two examples support this suggestion, with associated relevant empirical support. First, there is AutoTutor, an agent that collaboratively helps the student answer difficult questions and solve problems. Second, there is CPS in the context of a multi-party simulation called Land Science in which the system tracks progress and knowledge states of small groups of 3–4 students. Human mentors or computer agents prompt them to perform actions and exchange open-ended chat in a collaborative learning and problem-solving environment.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to assess the avenues through which traditional notions of information literacy skills shape oral communication curriculum and to identify steps that can be taken to transform the experience of students in the public speaking classroom so that they are offered an opportunity to develop understandings of how they use information to learn.

Approach – This chapter engages in an analysis of teaching materials and best practice scholarship used in the traditional college public speaking classroom. An informed learning perspective is applied to this corpus to identify the ways in which an information literacy skills approach is reflected in current practice.

Findings – The analysis highlights the prevalence of an information literacy skills approach throughout the oral communication curriculum. Textbooks, assignment types and guidelines, along with grading rubrics and instructor feedback all perpetuate a skills approach. Outside class support, including peer tutors and library instruction, also contribute to a focus on information literacy over informed learning.

Implications – Informed learners are better prepared to engage and apply information across contexts and to use information to continue learning. Informed learners are reflective on the knowledge they gain through information use. Therefore, this chapter concludes that public speaking courses, along with the communication centers and libraries that support oral communication instruction, should embrace an informed learning approach to the development of course materials, assignments, and teaching.

Originality/value – Suggestions for reframing public speaking curriculum and support from the informed learning perspective are provided.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of four different forms of feedback (such as, complete solution, line-by-line correction, line-by-line hint and correct-incorrect final answer) of a mobile-assisted learning application on linear equations and motivation of students towards mathematics learning on students’ mathematics performance.

Totally, 285 Grade 7 students (72 students each for the first-three feedback and 69 students for the last feedback) participated in the five-day experiment. A validated instrument was utilized to determine the motivation of students in learning mathematics.

It was revealed that students solved more problems and spent more time in the line-by-line hint type of feedback. The correct-incorrect final answer group had the most number of incorrect problems solved. It was found that the scores of the students would be different from one another after they utilized the app. Nonetheless, all of them learnt significantly from the app. Five steps of hierarchical regression revealed that all types of feedback were consistent predictors of posttest scores. Thus, the first null hypothesis stating that there is no significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the students when categorized by different forms of feedback was rejected. The second null hypothesis stating that the four types of feedback and motivation of students do not influence mathematics performance is partially rejected.

The study can be replicated in a school with a different atmosphere.

The use of the application is highly recommended for students who are beginning to learn linear equations. Teachers can replicate the four types of feedback in an actual classroom setting.

It was confirmed that the four types of feedback can teach the students learn mathematics, regardless of the motivation of the students.