G USTAVO N OBOA

Teaching in ill-defined domains is a challenging task, therefore rigorous research has been done seeking for suitable teaching pedagogies. Simon proposes the idea of dividing the main ill-defined problem into subproblems (Simon 1973), where each can be individually investigated as a well defined problem. This view has inspired our work on designing the moral dilemmas as problem-solving episodes. The used dilemmas have been analyzed and transferred to graph structure representations in order to allow the student to interact at interleaved points. These points require ethical reasoning and an ability to evaluate the current faced discrepancy, thereby helping the participants to experience the complexities of making ethical decisions in realistic situations (Winter & McCalla 1999).

The empirical evaluation done has shown that some participants were able to draw analogies and relate their experience to real world ones. The results also showed some evidence on transferability, such as

P6: “I think this can help me solve school problems.”

So it seems that this kind of experience can enrich the analogical-problem solving skills of the students and may allow them to use the solution to a source problem as a plan for solving a target problem in real life. The effect of multiple analogical problem- solving episodes has been seen as a way for individuals to induce abstract schematic representations of problems and their solutions that can be retrieved and applied as solution plans when structurally similar problems are presented (Ormerod 2006).

The Socratic Method has been chosen to act as the main teaching pedagogy for many reasons: it can be easily weaved within the teaching moments stories and for its ability to provide a medium that encourages the student to think critically in order to solve the discrepancies encountered in the moral situations they got involved in. Evaluation of AEINS shows positive and encouraging results from using this method as discussed in Section 6.6.5.3. The students were forced to think about the suitable action(s) they should take to solve the conflict in the situations they face, in addition to considering the consequences of their actions. Raising the stakes strategy in the Socratic Method forces the students to think differently, consider issues that were not considered before and see things from different perspectives.

Section 7.2 Thesis questions 141

From studying the participants’ log files, it has been found that most of the participants who performed an unethical action were able to discover the negative aspects of this action and reconsidered their situation. For example, one participant who chose to help his friend to take a chocolate bar without paying for it has been involved in a Socratic Dialogue. It can be seen that the participant was able to discover what was wrong and eventually to tell his friend to return the chocolate back. This is considered as one of the interesting findings as it provides evidence on the validity of the used techniques. Further work on this method would be on the dynamic generation of the Socratic questions using natural language interface and free text input.

Adaptation and providing feedback are crucial to any successful educational process. It was found that following a player’s misconception, a subsequent adaptive hint improved the player’s subsequent approach to the correct solution. Based on the intrinsic evaluation and the study of the log files, the sequence of the presented teaching moments was the right sequence for those participants.

Deciding on the way of providing feedback and how frequent it should be delivered is an open question in adaptive educational applications. In story-based learning environments, it is agreed that providing implicit feedback is much more preferable than providing explicit feedback in the form of interfering ‘right answer’ and ‘wrong answer’ messages. The implicit feedback exhibits the following advantages. First, it can be delivered in a non-invasive way since it is part of the story without affecting the player’s experience. Secondly, it is more suitable for ill-defined problems that have no complete right or wrong answers, because it leaves the user to freely interpret and self-reason on the whole argument from his own perspective.

Since learners differ in style and ways of learning, AEINS offers two types of feedback: the first type is formative feedback (delivered after a single or a few steps in a single task) and the second type is summative feedback (delivered after completion of the whole task) implicitly within the narrative context. Both kinds of feedback are provided as intrinsic rewards of learning and as part of the story. These rewards are based on a high congruence between the material being taught and the motivational techniques used (Lepper & Cordova 1992).

Other ways of providing feedback have been thought of, for instance adding extrinsic rewards in the form of visualized objects such as scores or tool bars that represent the strength of the student relationship with the agents inhabiting the environment. The idea at the first glance seems advantageous to apply, but further consideration of the type of

142 Discussion Chapter 7

domain AEINS is dealing with suggests some deep-rooted conflicts. On one hand, they may engage the user and on the other, they can have a detrimental effect on learning (Lepper & Cordova 1992) leading to distraction and/or deviation from the educational goals. For example, having a scoring system in AEINS can affect the application of the student’s actual beliefs where the focus will be on increasing the score by any means. On the other side of the spectrum, even if the student chooses to try things and not applying his own beliefs, the educational goals are still persistent as he will be faced by consequences that allows him to test the validity of what he chooses to apply. In this case, it seems also that a scoring system can be disadvantageous in a way that can prevent the student from trying to discover other routes and possibilities of the teaching moments; where some of these routes can lower his score.