Arthur Ward

Thank you for visiting. I am currently a post-doc working under the supervision of Dr. Rebecca Crowley

My work so far has focused on the problems of predicting learning from interactive tutorial dialog, and using the insights gained to increase the effectiveness of tutoring. My general approach has been to adapt theory from the study of human text comprehension. For example, I have extended models of memory during reading to predict learning from tutorial dialog. Similarly, I extended a measure of cohesion in text to measuring cohesion in dialog, and found that certain types of tutorial dialog cohesion were correlated with learning. I have also adapted measures of priming and convergence in spoken dialog and used them to predict learning from interactive tutoring dialog. Links to pre-publication final drafts of papers describing this work are given below.

In my experimental work, I have also shown that the cohesiveness of a reflective text given after tutoring can affect learning from the tutoring session, and that this effect interacts with student domain knowledge and motivation level. This work extends prior results in text comprehension to reflective text, and shows for the first time their impact on tutoring. Several papers describing this work are currently in preparation, or under review.

I am now starting a new project to investigate the potential of Intelligent Tutoring Systems to improve reading fluency among dyslexics. In this work I hope to again transfer insights between the fields of computational linguistics, intelligent tutoring systems, and reading comprehension.