Thesis of Rubiela Carrillo Rozo


Subject:
Monitoring learners' engagement in mind mapping activities from interaction traces

Defense date: 11/03/2019

Advisor: Mohand-Said Hacid
Coadvisor: Elise Lavoué, Yannick Prié

Summary:

In contrast to rote learning, meaningful learning aims to associate new knowledge with knowledge already acquired. Mind mapping activities require and support the implementation of meaningful learning strategies and enlighten the knowledge structure of the learner. However, teachers who integrate mind mapping into their educational activities have to deal with the final rendering of maps, and risk to misinterpret and wrongly evaluate them due to the lack of information about their construction process. In this thesis, we are interested in a posteriori observation of the engagement of learners along its behavioral and cognitive dimensions, in order to propose processoriented indicators that help to understand actions and construction choices of mind maps. We followed the Design Based Research methodology, that allowed us to propose three levels of contributions : 1) a theoretical model of engagement (behavioral and cognitive) for mind mapping activities, 2) a set of indicators of learner engagement constructed from automatically captured map building traces, and 3) a dashboard called MindMap Monitor presenting various indicators to teachers for class and learners monitoring. The model was obtained from a literature review on theories of engagement, including research in educational psychology. The indicators have been defined by comparing the model with the results of several field studies with teachers. The dashboard implementing the indicators was developed following three iterations. Its interface presents synthetic views allowing the comparison of students in the class, the identification of those in difficulty, and detailed views describing the mind mapping activity for each student. Our dashboard was evaluated with an experiment involving 12 teachers. We compared its use with that of final mind maps associated with videos of their construction process. Results show that our indicators on MindMap Monitor are useful to better identify students in difficulty, shared difficulties, as well as difficulties for individual students. Results concerning the understanding of the mind maps construction process are more balanced. We were also able to identify several ways to improve both the content and the visualizations of the dashboard. The perspectives of our work are mainly related to monitoring learners’ engagement in real time for the intervention and adaptation of the teachers’ educational strategies


Jury:
Mme Luengo VandaProfesseur(e)Sorbonne UniversitéRapporteur(e)
M George SébastienProfesseur(e)Le Mans UniversitéRapporteur(e)
Mme Guin NathalieMaître de conférenceUniversité Lyon 1Examinateur​(trice)
Mme MAILLES-VIARD METZ StéphanieMaître de conférenceUniversité Montpellier 3Examinateur​(trice)
M HACID Mohand-SaïdProfesseur(e)Université Lyon 1Directeur(trice) de thèse
Mme Lavoué EliseMaître de conférenceUniversité Lyon 3Co-encadrant(e)
M Prié YannickProfesseur(e)Université de NantesCo-encadrant(e)