A Socratic ASK System: Helping educators provide a Web-based Socratic mentor for learners. An important role an educator can play in a learning environment is making learners aware of issues, nuances, and problems through Socratic questioning. Prior research has shown the potential of Socratic dialogue for increasing reflection and learning. Providing sufficient Socratic mentoring is a challenge in courses with large enrollments. To address that problem, I designed and studied a mentoring system called Socratic ASK (Sask). Experienced educators design Web-based mentors, called Sask Mentors, with a provided Web-based authoring tool. Mentors are designed to augment educators' mentoring by providing more access and exposure to their Socratic dialogue. The Mentor interface is designed to facilitate a Socratic conversation with learners, including encouraging them to reflect on their learning task and express their own hypotheses. Educators can also link Mentor utterances to display any Web content, including video clips or simulations. Data from a quasi-experimental study in a Biomedical Engineering laboratory course show that increasing the amount of available Socratic mentors in a learning activity by using a Sask Mentor called the Dialysis Mentor fostered observed problematization and Task-Situated Reflection from students (in stages of the lesson the software was designed to handle). Dialysis Mentor usage had no significant effect on a delayed assessment of learning except for students who scored above the median on a pre-test. However, Dialysis Mentor usage had a large negative effect on an immediate assessment of learning. Qualitative analysis of students' and mentors' dialogue revealed both the Dialysis Mentor's and the Sask System architecture's educationally beneficial features and opportunities for improvement, including the possible need for dynamic cognitive modeling found in Intelligent Tutoring Systems without making the authoring process too burdensome or resource intensive for educators.This work has important implications for the usefulness of simple Socratic software mentors. It provides a basic theoretical framework for fostering problematization and Task-Situated Reflection through Socratic dialogue as well as software that can be used to refine the framework.

Last modified

• 05/09/2018

Creator

• Baba Kofi Adam Cooper Puryear Adam Cooper Puryear

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2BQ30

Subject

• Education and Social Policy - Learning Sciences

Keyword

• educational software
• intelligent tutoring systems
• reflection
• computer assisted instruction
• metacognition
• mentoring

Date created

• 2006-12-25

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright