Using Latent Semantic Analysis and Word Matching to Semantically Identify Elaboration Reading Strategy

Govindarajan Lalitha
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Chutima Bhoonthum

School of Sciences Computer Science

Introduction Initiative Impact

Conclusions
It is important for Freshmen students to be introduced to pair programming in the introductory level courses because it allows the students to establish a learning and social relationship with their peers. The students have been very receptive to pair programming. Being that more than fifty percent of the students passed the course we definitely believe that pair programming is effective and it is a good tool to use to improve retention.

In order to have a productive class three teachers assistances were chosen to help with the CS1 lab class. The pairing of the students was done by evaluating their programming ability, their grasp of the material, their perceived ability and their interactions with the other students. These pairs changed partners a total of six times throughout the semester. Pair evaluation forms were required for all students to do after each lab. These pair evaluations allowed us to determine the competence of the pairs. The teachers assistances were also in charge of observing the pair as they worked. A course survey was given at the end of the semester to get the students opinions of pair programming.

Future Work

Do you feel you could have done better overall in this course without working with a partner during labs?
19% Yes No 81%

Would you have preferred to pick your own lab partners each class?
31% 69% No Yes

21 students enrolled in this course and none of the students dropped the course; 57% passed. Out of 21 students that were enrolled 16 participated in the end of the year survey. More than 80% felt that they performed better with working with a partner than working alone. The students reported a negative attitude toward working with a partner that does not contribute and to a partner that thinks they know it all. Collaboration between the gender: Two males diligently worked on the task although only communicated when asking or answering a question. Two females together acted in one of two ways; they either talked excessively and did little work or refused to communicate until we stated that points would be deducted if partners did not talk to one another. A male + female pair had the best results, both generally participated in the programming related. Collaboration between different programming abilities: A student with a high ability level and a student with a much lower programming ability resulted in one of two things. Either the student who did not know as much allowed his or her partner to take the lead and do most of the work, or the person with the greater ability slowed down the programming process drastically and tried to explain the concepts. Pairs whose members had about an equal understanding of the subject matter had the most success in the lab.
Fall 2007
17% 33% Dropped Passed 50% Failed 43%

It seems that pair programming is a positive way to increase students learning and to assist with retention. At Hampton University we plan to utilize pair programming for the years to come. If pair programming continues to have a positive impact on the students we will look into adopting it in other courses in the Computer Science Department.
0%

Spring 2009
Dropped 57% Passed Failed

Do you believe that pair programming was used effectively in your class?
13% Yes No 87%

In United States, the children are found to score lower in science and reading in comparison to international level. This is partly because of their poor performance as reader. Even unfamiliar scientific text can be comprehended by increasing self explanation skills. Even when the students learn, they lack the depth to clearly understand the topic. Hence the need for improving comprehension skills among students has become a necessity. iSTART (Interactive Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinking) is a web-based automated tutor designed to help students become better readers via multi-media technologies and RSAT (Reading Strategy Assessment Tool) is also a web-based assessment that monitoring students strategy usage. Different reading strategies that are included in this are comprehension monitoring, paraphrasing, elaboration, predictions and bridging. The system then evaluates and scores the self explanation given by the student. The feedback is given by computations using Latent Semantic Analysis(LSA) and Word Matching Algorithms. This research focuses on an elaboration strategy, which encourages a reader to connect the information or text that they just read to the knowledge that they already knew and related to this text. This knowledge includes both prior knowledge as well as predicting what the text will say next. For each text, an original benchmark is used as well as modified versions we came up with. The modified benchmarks are obtained by removing overlap from prior benchmarks (current sentence and prior sentences), by removing high impact words. High impact words are words that contribute to high LSA cosine, i.e. making the two benchmarks similar. Three removal ways are used: (a) removing N words (b) removing N words within threshold value and (b) removing X% of words within threshold value. The students explanation is compared with each of the benchmarks (original and modified) and LSA values are calculated in each case. We use regression analysis to come up with the formula and we find whether the results are concurrent with those from human analysis.
The pass and fail rate of the students enrolled in the CS1 course in the Fall of 2007 when pair programming was not being implemented, lab classes were dedicated to independent programming.
Enrolled: 18

Enrolled: 21

This chart displays the pass and fail rate of the students that were enrolled in the CS1 course in the Spring of 2009, I n which pair programming was implemented.