In educational peer-review activities, one challenge is to tell which peer reviews are credible. Reputation systems are one approach. However, they work best in a scenario where (i) most of the peer reviewers can do a decent job, or (ii) reviewers tend to do peer-reviews in fixed styles─e.g., negative reviewers are negative on all artifacts they review; accurate reviewers grade all work accurat...

In this study, we explore the behaviors of children ages 7 to 12 years on our custom social network, KidGab, to understand the activities that increase participation and identity-related conversation. We specifically study the effects of two social networking affordances provided by KidGab: a suite of personality quizzes and a badge-based participatory reward system. Both affordances harness th...

As a technology based on database, statistics and AI, data mining provides biological research a useful information analyzing tool. The key factors which influence the performance of biological data mining approaches are the large-scale of biological data and the high similarities among patterns mined. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm named IRTM for mining frequent subtrees embe...

We introduce an approach to learn discriminative visual representations while exploiting external semantic knowledge about object category relationships. Given a hierarchical taxonomy that captures semantic similarity between the objects, we learn a corresponding tree of metrics (ToM). In this tree, we have one metric for each non-leaf node of the object hierarchy, and each metric is responsibl...

Flipping the classroom has become much more common in the last several years, but in the field of Computer Science it is still a much rarer means of delivery than the traditional classroom setting. One big concern is whether or not students will spend the preparation time necessary outside of the classroom in order to come prepared to class ready to engage in the active learning activities prep...

This paper presents an empirical study involving initiatives that encouraged students to log onto online courses in entrepreneurship delivered by the University of Glamorgan. The aim of the research was to explore items of interest to the online students that may increase participation in the forums and hence potentially enhanced engagement with the course module. The online tutor created addit...

To improve science learning, science educators' teaching tools need to address two major criteria: teaching practice should mirror our current understanding of the learning process; and science teaching should reflect scientific practice. We designed a small-group learning (SGL) model for a fourth year university neurobiology course using these criteria and studied student achievement and attit...

This paper describes a courseware system delivered over the World Wide Web for transforming existing video-taped courses. The on-line courses take advantage of the interactivity and the individualized instruction of intelligent tutoring systems. They use synchronized audio and HTML slides to present material to the student. An overlay student model records a student’s ability on each topic in t...

This paper describes elements introduced into a combined undergraduate/graduate data visualization course in order to make it more active and engaging. These elements include pre-class readings, interactive quizzes, reading reflections, and team-based activities.