Page 85 - Educational Technology A Primer for the 21st Century

74 4 Systems Perspective of Educational Technology

The mapping problem is that the alignment between the theoretical variables and
computer code is often vague, incomplete, or incompatible.
Learner modeling is the cornerstone of personalized learning. The learner model
is a representation of the system’s assessment of an individual learner’s current
knowledge, including misconceptions, learning styles, personality traits, and
affective states. The system infers this information from interactions between the
system and the learner (Spector, 2015).
The learner model consists of the cognitive, affective, motivational, and other
psychological states that evolves during the course of learning. The learner model is
often viewed as an overlay of the domain model, which changes over the course of
tutoring. For example, knowledge tracing tracks the learner’s progress from
problem to problem and builds a profile of strengths and weaknesses relative to the
domain model (Robert et al., 2013).

(3) Pedagogical Model
The pedagogical model selects appropriate strategies and activities to promote
successful learning given the progress of a particular learner and the associated
information stored in the learner model (Spector, 2015).
The pedagogical model accepts information from the domain models and student
models and devices tutoring strategies with actions. This model regulates instruc-
tional interactions with students. Pedagogical model is closely linked to the student
model, which makes use of knowledge about the student and its own tutorial goal
structure, to devise the pedagogic activity to be presented. It tracks the learner’s
progress, builds a profile of strengths and weaknesses relative to the production
rules (Ahuja & Sille, 2013).
The pedagogical model takes the domain models and learner models as input and
select tutoring strategies, steps, and actions on what the tutor should do next in the
exchange, in mixed-initiative systems, the learners may also take actions, ask
questions, or request help (Aleven et al., 2006). The pedagogical model always
needs to be ready to decide “what to do next” at any point and this is determined by
a pedagogical model that captures the researcher’s pedagogical theories.
(4) Interface Model
The interface model decides how to interpret user input and then how to give
appropriate responses. This requires both specific domain knowledge and some
commonsense knowledge about the world. The learner and system interaction is
traditionally expressed by typed or spoken texts, and recently by multimodal
interactions through mouse clicks, screen touches, facial expressions, eye move-
ments, and gestures (Spector, 2015).
User interface model is the interacting front end of the ITS. It integrates all types
of information needed to interact with learner, through graphics, text, multimedia,
keyboard, mouse-driven menus, etc. Prime factors for user acceptance are
user-friendliness and presentation (Ahuja & Sille, 2013).
The user interface interprets the learner’s contribution through various input
media (speech, typing, clicking) and produces output in different media (text,
diagrams, animations, agents). In addition to the conventional human–computer