Mary Beth Rosson

Curriculum improvement is a critical element of program quality assurance in higher education. In recent years, education researchers have explored ways to use analytics in support of curriculum renewal. In this literature review, we synthesize two bodies of related literature, curriculum analytics and teaching analytics, to understand curriculum improvement processes at both the program level and course level. Our analysis reveals relationships among these bodies of literature within the ecosystem of analytics, teacher inquiry, and student success. We also note that most existing research is aimed at understanding the prospects and challenges of technical infrastructures, not on the expectations or experiences of the instructors or administrators expected to use the analytics. Future research should expand to consider stakeholders’ perspectives when designing tools to support curriculum improvement; it should …

Online users often express grave concerns about their privacy, yet exhibit free-wheeling behaviors and self-disclosures on social media sites. This discrepancy between attitudes and behaviors (referred to as a “privacy paradox”) may arise from having too little time and cognitive resources to process privacy considerations in a systematic way. To cope with information overload, online users often make privacy decisions based on contextual cues on social media, which tend to over-emphasize potential benefits and downplay potential risks of self-disclosure. For instance, cues in the form of metrics on the interface, such as the number of other employees in a person's organization who have enrolled in LinkedIn by disclosing their personal information, can trigger the bandwagon heuristic (“if disclosing information is good for so many others, it's good for me, too”). Drawing from a decade of research on online privacy …

Adaptive learning systems aim to emulate how skilled educators seek to provide every student the best possible learning experience. We investigate how such systems might be enriched by activities and indicators of social learning - an aspect of learning that focuses on the influences of learners’ social context and interactions. In this paper we describe a pilot study aimed at exploring the potential for including social learning in an adaptive system. Our analysis of the social learning scale demonstrates its validity and usefulness for our ongoing work. Our qualitative analysis of students’ learning demonstrates how social learning vary among students. We discuss how the rating scale results and observations of social learning can be integrated within a student model needed to drive an adaptive system. More generally, our work illustrates how theories of learning can contribute to the design of adaptive learning …

Learning analytics has become a robust research area in the last decade, as innovative analytic models of learning data have been created with the goal of enhancing teaching and learning. However, barriers to large scale adoption of such technologies in higher education still exist. In recent years, a strand of research has begun to investigate stakeholders' expectations of learning analytics, hoping to find ways to integrate the innovations into everyday teaching practices. For instance, studies have investigated instructors' ideas about how learning analytics might be helpful, as well as concerns about student data privacy. However, most studies have taken a general approach rather than considering instructors' day-to-day experiences. Using survey methods, we presented instructors with hypothetical scenarios of learning analytics in use across disciplines, class sizes, teaching activities, and types of student data …

Locating and grasping objects is a critical task in people’s daily lives. For people with visual impairments, this task can be a daily struggle. The support of augmented reality frameworks in smartphones can overcome the limitations of current object detection applications designed for people with visual impairments. We present AIGuide, a self-contained smartphone application that leverages augmented reality technology to help users locate and pick up objects around them. We conducted a user study to investigate the effectiveness of AIGuide in a visual prosthetic for providing guidance; compare it to other assistive technology form factors; investigate the use of multimodal feedback, and provide feedback about the overall experience. We gathered performance data and participants’ reactions and analyzed videos to understand users’ interactions with the nonvisual smartphone user interface. Our results show that …

Options for students to learn and connect with each other have diversified in recent years, with online resources and campuses playing an increasing role. Flexibility and comfort are becoming a priority as students choose when, where and how to pursue learning goals. Nonetheless, students want to feel sense of community with their peers and instructors; institutional bonds are in turn associated with enhanced learning. In this paper, we explore the feelings of community among students studying at a geographically distributed university. We seek to understand how the students understand community, the levels of community they feel and how their campus location may affect these feelings. In this paper, we present findings from both a survey and an interview study and consider the implications for tools that might promote community.

Many initiatives have focused on attracting girls and young women (K-12 or college) to computer science education. However, professional women who never learned to program have been largely ignored, despite the fact that such individuals may have many opportunities to benefit from enhanced skills and attitudes about computer programming. To provide a convenient learning space for this population, we created and evaluated the impacts of a nine-week web development workshop that was carefully designed to be both comfortable and engaging for this population. In this article, we report how the professionals’ attitudes and skills grew over the course of the workshop and how they now expect to integrate these skills and attitudes into their everyday lives.

The last two decades of research in higher education have seen a major shift to learning that takes place online, for example as augmentation of classroom activities at a university, or as a new paradigm for remote education delivery (e.g., MOOCs). This shift has introduced many new forms of teaching and learning. Yet, a substantial component of education in higher education institutions continues to be delivered in analog form as lectures. The persistence of lecture-based instruction motivates our work that seeks to foster active student engagement with such content. Studies have questioned the efficacy of lecture-based instruction, primarily because lectures are widely considered to be passive and teacher-centric. To ameliorate passivity in learning, teachers may interleave lectures with interactive activities like student group work, peer instruction or subscribe to engagement techniques such as student polling or …

As the amount and variety of student data captured by university systems increase, so do opportunities for learning analytics (LA) in support of teaching and learning. However, although the technical methods underpinning LA are developing rapidly (e.g., machine learning), researchers have paid less attention to the needs or concerns of human stakeholders. Existing studies that investigate stakeholders’ perspectives tend to focus on either the technology (Sun et al., 2019) or on specific stakeholders’ views of student data privacy (Alnald & Sclater, 2017; Ifenchaler & Shumacher, 2016; Slade et al., 2019; Tsai, et al., 2020). Existing studies have used both surveys (Kollom et al., 2021; Whitelock-Wainwrite et al., 2020) and interviews (Ifenchaler & Shumacher, 2016; Sun et al., 2019) to investigate stakeholders’ expectations about LA technologies. Our study contributes to the LA literature in two ways: we used a …

Feedback is essential to creative work. In fact, feedback is so valuable that online crowdwork platforms are sometimes used to gather it quickly and repeatedly. However, when feedback contains negative content, the receiver’s mood may suffer, as well as his or her perceptions of the feedback and provider. In response, researchers have explored techniques to mitigate the negative impacts of constructive comments; surprisingly, few studies have investigated non-verbal communication such as images. We report an exploratory study of how the presence of positive emojis in a critique can affect the receivers’ reactions. We found that the positive emojis increased receiver positivity, also decreasing annoyance and frustration. The emojis also evoked more positive perceptions of feedback providers, and increased intentions to apply the feedback to future work. We discuss implications for designing feedback …

This paper presents an exploratory investigation of how students might benefit from recorded class lectures. Our overarching goal is to inform design of an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that adds value to lecture recordings. To study this possibility, we surveyed undergraduate students about their active learning strategies and their visions of how AI might help them to engage more richly with digitized learning materials. We report our findings and discuss implications for design of a tool that can add value to recorded lectures; we also consider more generally the possibilities of using lecture recordings to enhance student learning.

Remote sighted assistance provides prosthetic support to people with visual impairments (PVI) through internet-mediated conversational interactions. In these interactions, PVI broadcast live video to remotely-located, sighted people who engage in speech interactions with PVI to create prosthetic support. These interactions can be quite nuanced, creative, and effective. In this paper, we present a design investigation of remote sighted assistance (RSA) in which computer vision capabilities are integrated into the prosthetic interaction, supporting the human participants in various ways. Our study involved creating design scenarios to identify and concretize future possibilities in order to articulate and analyze design rationale for these scenarios, that is to say, strengths and challenges of RSA integrated with CV. We discuss implications for the design of the next generation of remote sighted assistance.

Technology development in human–computer interaction (HC1) can be interpreted as a coevolution of tasks and artifacts. The tasks people actually engage in (successfully or problematically) and those they wish to engage in (or perhaps merely to imagine) define requirements for future technology and, specifically, for new HCI artifacts. These artifacts, in turn, open up new possibilities for human tasks, new ways to do familiar things, and entirely new kinds of things to do. In this chapter, we describe psychological design rationale as an approach to augmenting HCI technology development and to clarifying the sense in which HCI artifacts embody psychological theory. A psychological design rationale is an enumeration of the psychological claims embodied by an artifact for the situations in which it is used. As an example, we present our design work with the View Matcher, a Smalltalk programming environment for coordinating multiple views of an example application. In particular, we showJohn Carroll is a cognitive psychologist interested in the analysis of human learning and problem solving in human–computer interaction contexts and in the design of methods and tools for instruction and design; he is Professor of Computer Science and Psychology and Head of the Computer Science Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Mary Beth Rosson is a cognitive psychologist interested in the mental activities associated with complex design tasks and in the analysis and development of methods and tools to support such tasks; she is Associate Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Technology development in human–computer interaction (HC1) can be interpreted as a coevolution of tasks and artifacts. The tasks people actually engage in (successfully or problematically) and those they wish to engage in (or perhaps merely to imagine) define requirements for future technology and, specifically, for new HCI artifacts. These artifacts, in turn, open up new possibilities for human tasks, new ways to do familiar things, and entirely new kinds of things to do. In this chapter, we describe psychological design rationale as an approach to augmenting HCI technology development and to clarifying the sense in which HCI artifacts embody psychological theory. A psychological design rationale is an enumeration of the psychological claims embodied by an artifact for the situations in which it is used. As an example, we present our design work with the View Matcher, a Smalltalk programming environment for …

Locating and grasping objects is a critical task in people’s daily lives. For people with visual impairments, this task can be a daily struggle. The support of augmented reality frameworks in smartphones has the potential to overcome the limitations of current object detection applications designed for people with visual impairments. We present AIGuide, a self-contained offline smartphone application that leverages augmented reality technology to help users locate and pick up objects around them. We conducted a user study to validate its effectiveness at providing guidance, compare it to other assistive technology form factors, evaluate the use of multimodal feedback, and provide feedback about the overall experience. Our results show that AIGuide is a promising technology to help people with visual impairments locate and acquire objects in their daily routine.

People with visual impairments (PVI) must interact with a world they cannot see. Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive technology. We interviewed RSA assistants ("agents") who provide assistance to PVI via a conversational prosthetic called Aira (https://aira.io/) to understand their professional practice. We identified four types of support provided: scene description, navigation, task performance, and social engagement. We discovered that RSA provides an opportunity for PVI to appropriate the system as a richer conversational/social support tool. We studied and identified patterns in how agents provide assistance and how they interact with PVI as well as the challenges and strategies associated with each context. We found that conversational interaction is highly context-dependent. We also discuss implications for design.

Online users' attitudes toward privacy are context-dependent. Studies show that contextual cues are quite influential in motivating users to disclose personal information. Increasingly, these cues are embedded in the interface, but the mechanisms of their effects (e.g., unprofessional design contributing to more disclosure) are not fully understood. We posit that each cue triggers a specific "cognitive heuristic" that provides a rationale for decision-making. Using a national survey (N = 786) that elicited participants' disclosure intentions in common online scenarios, we identify 12 distinct heuristics relevant to privacy, and demonstrate that they are systematically associated with information disclosure. Data show that those with a higher accessibility to a given heuristic are more likely to disclose information. Design implications for protection of online privacy and security are discussed.