PhD Research

Adaptive Learning Web Environments with Knowledge Representation and Social Interaction.

I am working with this topic for a while now. At present my focus is related with Adaptive Assessment with Visual Feedback. The general idea is deliver a formative assessment tool for teachers and students work anywhere. The research concept is not new, but the added value is its innovative and practical usefulness in high school contexts. I plan to deliver a prototype, which is my proof of concept in my PhD work, and hopefully will continue develop it with additional features afterwards. The tool will allow students to interact and share knowledge with other learners, scaffold by teachers, to improve their involvement, participation or motivation levels at school.

Previously, I have been looking at several topics like Learning Theories, Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Learning Environments and Assessment Platforms. During this period someone called me an inventor, trying to apply distinct things with my work. Suddenly realised, I needed to do research more focused and seriously. The first approach, in 2008, of a mashable solution gave place, in 2011, to a tailored application. Of course the complexity and difficulty increased but I decided to design an assessment tool looking at what other solutions have best and develop it. This led my research to the field of Instructional Design and Human Computer Interaction applied to Assessment Environments. I have decided to use the Django framework and Python language for the devevelopment environment.

When I grasped the focus of my real interest, Adaptive Assessment became the thesis topic. I manage to understood what a PhD is all about (I hope). The innovative approach method on adaptive assessment is based on visual feedback trying to motivate students with visual representations of the acquiring knowledge.

Considering that knowledge transfer is ubiquitous, happens anywhere and anytime, and it is a social process, schools should be contextualised with this ubiquity feature. Additionally, the knowledge transfer must have ground domains and expert guiders. Undoubtedly the school and the classroom are excellent places to promote the knowledge transfer, but it is not a closed environment. The digital age breaks the classroom walls and widens its reachability.

Our hypothesis is that students desire immediate results during the learning process and quantitative measures to differentiate themselves. Also there is an appealing interest in image representations, in line with visual thinkers, who use the emotional and creative part of the brain to organize information or thoughts in an intuitive manner. Our research is focused on how to use technology for formative assessment in formal learning contexts, to individually infer which knowledge each student is acquiring and identify the learning strengths and weaknesses.

All this work has been closely supervised by Prof. Francisco José Restivo, partially supported by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through scholarship SFRH/BD/36206/2007 and specially attention to the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory (LIACC) of Porto University for excellent working conditions.