Technology

While text-to-speech software has largely made textual information accessible in the digital space, analogous access to graphics still remains an unsolved problem. Because of their portability and ubiquity, several studies have alluded to touchscreens as a potential platform for such access, yet there is still a gap in our understanding of multimodal information transfer in the context of graphics. The current research demonstrates feasibility for following lines, a fundamental graphical concept, via vibrations and sounds on commercial touchscreens.

This paper illustrates how the combination of teacher and computer guidance can strengthen collaborative revision and identifies opportunities for teacher guidance in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. We took advantage of natural language processing tools embedded in an online, collaborative environment to automatically score student responses using human-designed knowledge integration rubrics. We used the automated explanation scores to assign adaptive guidance to the students and to provide real-time information to the teacher on students’ learning.