Teachers’ Involvement in Designing MERLO Items: Boundary Crossing

Meaning Equivalence Reusable Learning Objects (MERLO) items are a new kind of didactical tool that can be designed by teachers and used in classes, in tasks aimed at engaging students in deep reasoning, exploring and arguing about mathematical concepts. The interactions across communities of mathematics teachers and educators in on-line professional development were studied with attention to the phenomenon of boundary crossing of MERLO items, viewed as boundary objects in this article. The study analyseda first (international) crossing of the object that passedinstitutional boundaries (between Australian and Italian school systems), and a second crossing of the same object –inside the Australian institutional community – that passed boundaries (from static to dynamic representations) that we interpret in terms of method both for teachers and for researchers. This passage is possible due to the use of dynamic geometry software (GeoGebra) that supported a modification in the design of the item. The analysis shows boundary crossing as a process of transformation that can influence a modification (more or less stable) in the practices of the teachers involved and provides a deep research insight in relation to existing theoretical frameworks.

Designing a scaffold for mechanistic reasoning in organic chemistry

Designing problems and learning activities is a key factor to initiating students’ engagement with the course material and influencing their reasoning processes. Although tasks and problems are a central part of teaching and assessments in the chemistry classroom, they may not engage students in deep reasoning or in a way that is intended through a task. Some problems may cause an algorithmic or a surface approach. Even with designing clever problems, students may not use a larger variety of chemistry ideas and connect them in meaningful ways. Here the idea of scaffolding students’ answering process comes into play. Structuring students’ reasoning process through instructional prompts or structured worksheets supports students in activating and connecting knowledge pieces in a more meaningful way and positively slows down their fast decision-making process. This paper will discuss the importance of asking questions in chemistry teaching and highlights the idea of contrasting cases, drawn from cognitive psychology, as a task design principle. In addition to having contrasting cases as a good problem format, the idea of scaffolding students’ reasoning while solving contrasting cases through the use of instructional prompts that scaffold the reasoning process will be exemplarily showcased for mechanistic reasoning in organic chemistry.

Cognitive Intelligence

The theme of IEEE ICCI*CC'16 on Cognitive Informatics (CI) and Cognitive Computing (CC) was on cognitive computers, big data cognition, and machine learning. CI and CC are a contemporary field not only for basic studies on the brain, computational intelligence theories, and denotational mathematics, but also for engineering applications in cognitive systems towards deep learning, deep thinking, and deep reasoning. This paper reports a set of position statements presented in the plenary panel (Part I) in IEEE ICCI*CC'16 at Stanford University. The summary is contributed by invited panelists who are part of the world's renowned scholars in the transdisciplinary field of CI and CC.

Deep Reasoning for Enhancing Etextbooks (DREE): Using Deep-Level Questions for Guiding Learning

The popularity of ebooks does not extend to an increasing interest in etextbooks among students. A common form of etextbooks is the digital replica of the original printed book; however, a lack of interactivity was considered as an issue of etextbook among college students. To explore the potential beneficial interactive affordances, this study proposes a web-based interactive etextbook with built-in multimedia videos and self-test quizzes. Assessments have been conducted to examine the effect of using the interactive etextbook on learning and perception of learning. The results imply that a combination of multiple interactive features in etextbooks could produce optimal perception on learning and show the potential for impacting learning.

Cognitive Intelligence

The theme of IEEE ICCI*CC'16 on Cognitive Informatics (CI) and Cognitive Computing (CC) was on cognitive computers, big data cognition, and machine learning. CI and CC are a contemporary field not only for basic studies on the brain, computational intelligence theories, and denotational mathematics, but also for engineering applications in cognitive systems towards deep learning, deep thinking, and deep reasoning. This paper reports a set of position statements presented in the plenary panel (Part I) in IEEE ICCI*CC'16 at Stanford University. The summary is contributed by invited panelists who are part of the world's renowned scholars in the transdisciplinary field of CI and CC.