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LILT, Dept. of ICS • University of Hawai`i at Manoa • 1680 East-West Road, POST 309 • Honolulu, HI 96822 • 1-808-956-3890

The Representational Guidance Project

At a time when public schools are making larger investments in hardware and software, and colleges and universities are increasingly turning to distance education technology to reach a broader customer base, it is critical we maximize the effectiveness of technology for learning. The Representational Guidance project was started to improve our understanding of how collaborative learning is facilitated by computer software with which learners construct and manipulate visual representations of their emerging knowledge. "Representational guidance" refers to how these software environments facilitate the expression and inspection of different kinds of information.

With funding from the National Science Foundation Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence program, we conducted experimental studies of how three tools for constructing representations of evidential models (Graph, Matrix and Text representations) influenced face to face collaborative learning processes and outcomes (the image is from our video capture of a Graph session). Our results included differences in the quantity of different kinds of information that were represented, the amount of talk devoted to issues of evidence, differences in focus on essential versus irrelevant relationships, and differences in whether the representational work done by student participants was reflected in the content of essays they wrote later. See our papers (listed below) for details of results. We are presently analyzing the results of a distance collaboration study.

This work provides a better understanding of the role of representational bias in guiding collaborative learning and problem solving processes. It can inform the design of more effective collaborative learning and distance learning environments, and also has applications to the design of representational tools for a variety of other knowledge applications, such as collaborations between scientists.

Related Publications

Suthers, D., and Hundhausen, C. (to appear).

An Empirical Study of the Effects of Representational Guidance on Collaborative Learning. To appear in Journal of the Learning Sciences

Suthers, D., Girardeau, L., & Hundhausen, C. (2002).

The Roles of Representations in Online Collaborations, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), New Orleans, April 1-5, 2002.
PDF

Suthers, D. & Hundhausen, C. (2002).

The Effects of Representation on Students' Elaborations in Collaborative Inquiry, Proceedings of CSCL 2002, Boulder, Colorado, January 7-11, 2002, pp.472-480.
PDF preprint

Suthers, D. D. (2001).

Towards a Systematic Study of Representational Guidance for Collaborative Learning Discourse. Journal of Universal Computer Science 7(3), 2001. Electronic publication: http://www.jucs.org/jucs_7_3/towards_a_systematic_study
PDF preprint

Suthers, D. & Hundhausen, C. (2001).

Learning by Constructing Collaborative Representations: An Empirical Comparison of Three Alternatives. In P. Dillenbourg, A. Eurelings, K. Hakkarainen (Eds.) European Perspectives on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Proceedings of the First European Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, Universiteit Maastricht, Maastrict, the Netherlands, March 22-24 2001, pp. 577-584.
PDF preprint

Suthers, D. (2000).

Initial Evidence for Representational Guidance of Learning Discourse. To appear in Proceedings of International Conference on Computers in Education, November 21-24, 2000, Taipei, Taiwan
PDF preprint

Suthers, D. D. (1999).

Effects of Alternate Representations of Evidential Relations on Collaborative Learning Discourse. In C. M. Hoadley and J. Roschelle (Eds.), Proceedings of the Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL) 1999 Conference (pp. 611-620). Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University [Available from Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ]. Available: http://www.ciltkn.org/cscl99/A74/A74.HTM
PDF preprint

Suthers, D. D. (1999).

Representational Support for Collaborative Inquiry. Proceedings of the 32nd Hawai'i International Conference on the System Sciences (HICSS-32), January 5-8, 1999, Maui, Hawai'i (CD-ROM), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE).
PDF preprint

Suthers, D. D. (1999).

Representational Bias as Guidance for Learning Interactions: A Research Agenda. In Proceedings of the 9th World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED'97), July 19-23, 199, Le Mans France.
PDF preprint

Suthers, D. D. (1999).

Representational and Advisory Guidance for Learning: Alternate Roles for AI. In Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, August 9-12, 1999, Honolulu Hawai'i, USA
PDF preprint

Suthers, D. D. (1999).

The Effects of Representational Bias on Collaborative Inquiry. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, August 22-27, 1999 Munich Park Hilton, Munich, Germany
PDF preprint

The original proposal is here.