Learning by choosing Joseph E. Beck Research Scientist CS Department, WPI Friday, November 2^nd, 2007 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Fuller Labs 320 The purpose of this talk is twofold. First, I wish to introduce myself to the WPI community and to give a flavor of the types of research problems I address. This discussion will cover using data from educational software to assess students, to evaluate the tutor's teaching, and to determine how students mentally represent the domain of reading. Second, I will discuss whether students in the Reading Tutor, educational software that helps grade school children learn how to read, actually learn more when allowed to select what material to read. The paradoxical result is that in spite of grade schools students selecting worse stories from a pedagogical standpoint, they somehow learn more when doing so. I will close with a discussion of possible reasons for this apparent contradiction. ______ Joseph E. Beck joined the faculty of Worcester Polytechnic University as a Research Scientist in Fall 2007. Prior coming to WPI, he spent the prior six years on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. Joe's areas of research interest are educational software, machine learning, evaluation, assessment, and educational data mining. He founded the educational data mining workshop series in 2004, and is Program Co-Chair of the First International Conference on Educational Data Mining located in Montreal in June 2008. Host: Michael Gennert Refreshments will be served. Maintained by webmaster@cs.wpi.edu Last modified: 10/26/2007

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