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an item by clicking on it. The Reading Tutor then proceeds, optionally giving the student spoken
feedback on whether the answer was correct, at least in cases where it can tell. We cast the generic
why questions in multiple-choice form. When does this take place? in the present; in the future; in
the past; It could happen in the past; I can't tell. User tests showed that children understood them
better
than shorter, less explicit questions. To test the scaffolding effects of such questions on
children's
reading comprehension, we measured their performance on story-specific questions
asked shortly thereafter.
For this purpose, we used multiple-choice "close" (fill-in-the-blank)
questions generated automatically from a story sentence by deleting a word. The choices consist
of the missing word plus three distractor words. The distractor words are chosen randomly from
the same story, but constrained to have the same general type as the correct word: "sight" words,
"easy" words and "defined" words (words explicitly annotated with explanations). A previous
study showed that these four types of questions
are successively harder, and that children's
performance on them predicted their performance on standard measures of general comprehension
ability with correlations surpassing 0.8. We hypothesized that if a why question assisted
comprehension of the specific text at hand, it would make the reader likelier to answer the next
close question correctly.
The purpose of the why questions was not to assess comprehension, but to assist it. If test
question performance was
higher after why questions, we could infer that they helped students
comprehend. We wouldn't know if they were improving students' comprehension over time, but
we'd have evidence of near transfer in the sense of improved performance on nearby sentences -
that is, past the point in the text where the why question was inserted.
Conceptual support aims at
providing learners with some modelling primitives that can help them to conceptualize and
organize their collective work. Tailor ability can be introduced at this conceptual tools level by
proposing different possible modelling primitives or parametrizable primitives. An example of
such a conceptual support is the task notion, that can be linked both to Newell's rational principle
and the activity theory notions. We consider that introducing tailor-ability issues at the conceptual
level appears, in a learning context, too confusing. We therefore only propose the task notion. We
have chosen this task modelling primitive because it naturally refers to two aspects of work: " what
to do ? " and "how to do ? ". Task achieving and task handling support aim at providing learners
with means to achieve their work. Tailor-ability can be introduced at this
task level by not strictly
imposing them a manner of doing, enabling them to decide what tools they want to use. The
problem to be tackled here is that of the way learners can express their needs. This is the typical
problem of tailoring: it cannot be expected from users to be skilled programmers. Moreover, as
the tailoring will occur while using the system, the way users can tailor their system must be related
to their current task in order that they do not have to leave the application domain to work on the
underlying domain of programming, a shift that would cause a breakdown in the activity flow . In
our work we use the conceptual tool provided by the task notion as a way to solve this problem by
providing a unified way for learners to specify their needs for task achieving and task handling
support. The approach is based on two notions related to the task notion. Defining a task consists
in describing the way a task will be achieved, in particular, which tools will be used. We propose
learners with a shared interface that allow them to define collectively how they plan their collective
activity as a set of tasks. For every task, the learners have to define the objective of the task, its
nature (individual or collective), its subject (an individual, a subgroup), the
beginning and ending
dates, the tools (the general purpose tools that will be accessible to achieve this task), the resources
and production (files names). From this description, the framework generates an activity level that
proposes the tools that have been asked. The task definition therefore provides the learners with
means to specify the support (the general-purpose tools) they require to achieve a task.
Each task defined by the learners is delegated to an individual or a subgroup. Within this
context we introduce "task-oriented tool" capable of handling a task, in other words, which can be
delegated a task. Within our work, delegating a task occurs while defining it by specifying the
task's subject. We implement "task-oriented tools" as software agents capable of handling tasks
such as collecting different learners' productions and making them available to the group,
