Stephen Blessing
University of Tampa, Psychology, Faculty Member
We discuss a project given to introductory psychology students that increased their critical thinking regarding psychological findings, such as those that might appear in news reports (e.g., “listening to Mozart makes you smarter”) or... more
We discuss a project given to introductory psychology students that increased their critical thinking regarding psychological findings, such as those that might appear in news reports (e.g., “listening to Mozart makes you smarter”) or everyday life (e.g., “birds of a feather flock together”). Relative to students who did not do the project, students improved in their ability to take a psychological issue and decide how best to analyze it. Given these results and the positive student attitude toward it, this project seems to be an effective way to get students to engage critically with psychological issues.
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A capstone experience serves as a culminating exercise for students to assimilate the information learned in a course and to realize how to use the material and skills in different contexts. Both majors and nonmajors benefit from having... more
A capstone experience serves as a culminating exercise for students to assimilate the information learned in a course and to realize how to use the material and skills in different contexts. Both majors and nonmajors benefit from having the material in the introductory course consolidated in such a way, for later study in the field and to more firmly establish its main themes in their memory. For such an experience in the introductory course, we used the classic film 12 Angry Men as the basis for discussion and an assignment. The film contains many scenes that highlight various psychological phenomena from across the curriculum that can be used to integrate those phenomena. We tested the experience in a classroom setting and found that students accessed and integrated material from across the semester significantly better than those who did not have the capstone assignment.
Research Interests: Film and Twelve Angry Men
Researchers who have worked on authoring systems for intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have examined how examples may form the basis for authoring. In this chapter, we describe several such systems, consider their commonalities and... more
Researchers who have worked on authoring systems for intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have examined how examples may form the basis for authoring. In this chapter, we describe several such systems, consider their commonalities and differences, and reflect on the merit of such an approach. It is not surprising perhaps that several tutor developers have explored how examples can be used in the authoring process. In a broader context, educators and researchers have long known the power of examples in learning new material. Students can gather much information by poring over a worked example, applying what they learn to novel problems. Often these worked examples prove more powerful than direct instruction in the domain. For example, Reed and Bolstad (1991) found that students learning solely by worked examples exhibited much greater learning than those learning instruction based on procedures. By extension then, since tutor authoring can be considered to be teaching a tabula rasa tu...
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SPSS file for data in Experiment 2
SPSS data from Experiment 1
The data for both experiment reported in the paper
The Power of Personalization: Making a Museum Visit More Memorable with a Personalized Story Stephen Blessing University of Tampa Jeffrey Skowronek University of Tampa Keywords: ; ; ; ; ; Abstract: Research has shown that wrapping a visit... more
The Power of Personalization: Making a Museum Visit More Memorable with a Personalized Story Stephen Blessing University of Tampa Jeffrey Skowronek University of Tampa Keywords: ; ; ; ; ; Abstract: Research has shown that wrapping a visit to a museum around a story makes that visit more memorable. Blessing and Skowronek (2013) embedded activities for children at the Glazer Children’s Museum in a story that motivated each activity. We hypothesize that personalizing the story more, by including the child’s first name and other particular information provided by the child, will make the visit even more memorable. We performed a study at the museum where half the families toured the museum with a personalized story for the child and half received an identical, but un-personalized, story. The story, activities, and short quizzes were contained in an iPad application, which kept track of time, success at the quizzes, and also recorded conversations. Children also provided answers to a que...
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Why Are Some Problems Easy? New Insights into the Tower of Hanoi Glenn Gunzelmann (glenng@andrew.cmu.edu) Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Stephen Blessing (blessing@carnegielearning.com) Carnegie... more
Why Are Some Problems Easy? New Insights into the Tower of Hanoi Glenn Gunzelmann (glenng@andrew.cmu.edu) Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Stephen Blessing (blessing@carnegielearning.com) Carnegie Learning, 372 N. Craig St., Suite 101 Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Introduction Researchers have found large differences in difficulty and varying amounts of transfer among isomorphs of the Tower of Hanoi (Kotovsky, Hayes, & Simon, 1985; Hayes & Simon, 1977). Because the tasks have the same formal structure, these differences must result from the surface representations. To explain these findings, Kotovsky, et. al. pointed toward the ability to relate the rules to real- world knowledge and representation influence such as the externalization of rules (rules embedded in the external problem representation; also see Zhang, 1997). Despite this research, many questions remain about the processes underlying problem solving and transfer of learning. This experime...
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... Stephen B. Blessing Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 1521 3 USA 412-268-7136 blessing+@cmu.edu ... This expert model can be augmented by "buggy rules," which represent incorrect but... more
... Stephen B. Blessing Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 1521 3 USA 412-268-7136 blessing+@cmu.edu ... This expert model can be augmented by "buggy rules," which represent incorrect but frequently-attempted strategies. ...
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We discuss a project given to introductory psychology students that increased their critical thinking regarding psychological findings, such as those that might appear in news reports (e.g., “listening to Mozart makes you smarter”) or... more
We discuss a project given to introductory psychology students that increased their critical thinking regarding psychological findings, such as those that might appear in news reports (e.g., “listening to Mozart makes you smarter”) or everyday life (e.g., “birds of a feather flock together”). Relative to students who did not do the project, students improved in their ability to take a psychological issue and decide how best to analyze it. Given these results and the positive student attitude toward it, this project seems to be an effective way to get students to engage critically with psychological issues.
Research Interests:
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We created an application for the Apple iPad that families at a children’s museum used as they toured the museum. The application provided activities and explanation at various exhibit areas along with adaptive quizzes. We investigated... more
We created an application for the Apple iPad that families at a children’s museum used as they toured the museum. The application provided activities and explanation at various exhibit areas along with adaptive quizzes. We investigated their retention of the museum content and their attitudes toward the intervention. We found that content that provides an over-arching narrative to the museum experience along with the adaptive quizzes resulted in families enjoying the activities more, staying longer at the museum, and the children learning more information.
A capstone experience serves as a culminating exercise for students to assimilate the information learned in a course and to realize how to use the material and skills in different contexts. Both majors and nonmajors benefit from having... more
A capstone experience serves as a culminating exercise for students to assimilate the information learned in a course and to realize how to use the material and skills in different contexts. Both majors and nonmajors benefit from having the material in the introductory course consolidated in such a way, for later study in the field and to more firmly establish its main themes in their memory. For such an experience in the introductory course, we used the classic film 12 Angry Men as the basis for discussion and an assignment. The film contains many scenes that highlight various psychological phenomena from across the curriculum that can be used to integrate those phenomena. We tested the experience in a classroom setting and found that students accessed and integrated material from across the semester significantly better than those who did not have the capstone assignment.
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ABSTRACT Thesis (B.S.) in Psychology--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 40-41). Microfiche of typescript. s
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... Box Q Tampa, FL. 33606-1490 USA sblessing@ut.edu Liz Blankenship University of Michigan School of Information 1085 South University Ave. ... Comm. ACM 27(8), 800-806. [4] Corbett, AT Cognitive computer tutors: Solving the two-sigma... more
... Box Q Tampa, FL. 33606-1490 USA sblessing@ut.edu Liz Blankenship University of Michigan School of Information 1085 South University Ave. ... Comm. ACM 27(8), 800-806. [4] Corbett, AT Cognitive computer tutors: Solving the two-sigma problem. User Modeling: Proc. ...
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We describe a domain-independent authoring tool, ConceptGrid, that helps non-programmers develop intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that perform natural language processing. The approach involves the use of a lattice-style table-driven... more
We describe a domain-independent authoring tool, ConceptGrid, that helps non-programmers develop intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that perform natural language processing. The approach involves the use of a lattice-style table-driven interface to build templates that describe a set of required concepts that are meant to be a part of a student’s response to a question, and a set of incorrect concepts that reflect incorrect understanding by the student. The tool also helps provide customized just-in-time feedback based on the concepts present or absent in the student’s response. This tool has been integrated and tested with a browser-based ITS authoring tool called xPST.
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Our efforts to commercialize Cognitive Tutors have led us to a runtime representation that is significantly different from the production system representation used in the Tutor Development Kit. This paper describes our new... more
Our efforts to commercialize Cognitive Tutors have led us to a runtime representation that is significantly different from the production system representation used in the Tutor Development Kit. This paper describes our new representation, which we call the Tutor Runtime Environment (TRE).
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Our previous work has demonstrated that the Extensible Problem Specific Tutor (xPST) framework lowers the bar for non- programmers to author model tracing intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) on top of existing software and websites. In... more
Our previous work has demonstrated that the Extensible Problem Specific Tutor (xPST) framework lowers the bar for non- programmers to author model tracing intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) on top of existing software and websites. In this work we extend xPST to enable authoring of tutors in 3D games. This process differs substantially from authoring tutors for traditional GUI software in terms of the inherent domain complexity involved, different types of feedback required and interactions generated by various entities apart from the student. A tutor for a village evacuation task has been constructed in order to demonstrate the capabilities of using the extended xPST system to create a game-based tutor.
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Authoring tools enable the more rapid creation of intelligent tutoring systems. Such tools are essential for tutors to become more widespread. In this study we evaluate WebxPST, a browser-based authoring system that enables... more
Authoring tools enable the more rapid creation of intelligent tutoring systems. Such tools are essential for tutors to become more widespread. In this study we evaluate WebxPST, a browser-based authoring system that enables non-programmers to create model-tracing-like intelligent tutors. Five authors, two course instructors and three undergraduates, created 74 problems suitable for use in an undergraduate statistics curriculum. A subset of these problems was deployed in a classroom. These authors quickly mastered the authoring interface showing the feasibility of the tool.
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We have been creating an authoring tool, the Cognitive Model SDK, which allows non-cognitive scientists and non-programmers to produce a cognitive model for model-tracing tutors [1, 2]. The SDK is in use by developers at Carnegie Learning... more
We have been creating an authoring tool, the Cognitive Model SDK, which allows non-cognitive scientists and non-programmers to produce a cognitive model for model-tracing tutors [1, 2]. The SDK is in use by developers at Carnegie Learning to produce their commercial Cognitive Tutors for math. However, it has never been evaluated with regards to the strong claim that non-cognitive scientists and non-programmers could, without much effort, produce useful cognitive models with it. The research presented here shows that this can be done, using a task that past researchers have used [3]. The models are evaluated across several metrics to see what characteristics of either them or their creators may distinguish better models from worse models. The goal of this work is to establish a baseline for future work examining how cognitive modeling can be opened up to a wider class of people.