The design and study of pedagogical paper recommendation
Tang Ya · University Library - University of Saskatchewan (University of Saskatchewan) · 2008
For learners engaging in senior-level courses, tutors in many cases would like to pick some articles as supplementary reading materials for them each week.Unlike researchers 'Googling' papers from the Internet, tutors, when making recommendations, should consider course syllabus and their assessment of learners along many dimensions.As such, simply 'Googling' articles from the Internet is far from enough.That is, learner models of each individual, including their learning interest, knowledge, goals, etc. should be considered when making paper recommendations, since the recommendation should be carried out so as to ensure that the suitability of a paper for a learner is calculated as the summation of the fitness of the appropriateness of it to help the learner in general.This type of the recommendation is called a Pedagogical Paper Recommender.In this thesis, we propose a set of recommendation methods for a Pedagogical Paper Recommender and study the various important issues surrounding it.Experimental studies confirm that making recommendations to learners in social learning environments is not the same as making recommendation to users in commercial environments such as Amazon.com.In such learning environments, learners are willing to accept items that are not interesting, yet meet their learning goals in some way or another; learners' overall impression towards each paper is not solely dependent on the interestingness of the paper, but also other factors, such as the degree to which the paper can help to meet their 'cognitive' goals.It is also observed that most of the recommendation methods are scalable.Although the degree of this scalability is still unclear, we conjecture that those methods are consistent to up to 50 papers in terms of recommendation accuracy.encouragement, support, openness, guidance and inspiration throughout the years during my PhD studies, particularly after my return to Hong Kong five years ago.Without his numerous e-efforts and e-understandings, I would never been able to finish writing this thesis.Thanks also go to my advisory Committee members, whose constructive suggestions have helped me reshape this thesis.The efforts and support from