Background. Learning to manage a classroom is a difficult but important part of teacher education. Earlier research on simulations for learning classroom management has highlighted the difficulty of supporting reflection.

Purpose. This case study explores and evaluates the design of a simulation for student teachers’ reflection on classroom management.

Design. The design process resulted in the scenario-based SIMPROV simulation, which was made in the form of a hypermedia radio theatre that students go through in pairs or triads. Authoritarian, authoritative, democratic, and compliant leadership styles were built into the choices student teachers made.

Evaluation. The simulation was evaluated in two courses where the participants’ level of reflection and perceived knowledge improvement was measured using a questionnaire. Forty three first-year student teachers, 48 third-year student teachers, and 38 of the student teachers’ mentors participated in the evaluation.

Results. The results indicate that participants engaged in reflection and understanding to a high degree, and only to a low degree in critical reflection or habitual action.

Conclusions. The conclusions are that the scenario-based simulation designed as a hypermedia radio theatre supported knowledge improvement, understanding, and reflection and that social interaction during and after simulation sessions was an important feature.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2012, held in Linköping, Sweden, in June 2012. The 21 full papers presented together with 5 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. In addition three keynote papers are included in this volume. The papers cover the typical fields of persuasive technology, such as health, safety and education.

Problem based learning as used at Linköping University focuses on self-directed small-group learning in group sessions that are facilitated by staff or older students. We believe PBL might affect empathy because of two reasons; the feedback produced and received during tutorial sessions as well as the frequent collaboration could encourage the development of empathy. Also, personnel involved in tutoring engineering students often perceive that students from the engineering program that uses PBL are more mature in many respects, including empathy, than other students in engineering. The purpose of this study was to investigate the level of empathy among engineering students on a programme that uses PBL at Linköping University. 35 students from the first semester, and 22 from the 5th semester were analysed. The results show significant increase in empathy between the first and 5th semester.

When using computers to support learning, one significant problem is how to fmd out what the student understands and knows with respect to the knowledge the computer system is designed to help him to learn (the system's content goal). This analysis of the student is based on the input he provides to the system and it is evaluated with respect to the content goals of the system. This process is called student modelling. In essence this problem can be seen as that of bridging a gap between the input to the system and its content goals.

It is difficult to study the student's reasoning because it is not directly observable. With respect to the gap, this is a problem of paucity of student input. One possible solution, explored in this dissertation, is to have the student work collaboratively with a computer agent, a Learning Companion, and eavesdrop on the emerging dialogue.

This dissertation explores the feasibility of this idea through a series of studies. Examples of naturally occurring collaborative dialogue from two different domains are examined as to their informativeness for a student modelling procedure. Spoken as well as written dialogue is studied. The problem of information extraction from collaborative dialogue is briefly explored through prototyping. Prototyping is also used to study the design of a Learning Companion, whose behavior is based on observations from the dialogues in the informativeness study. It is concluded that for certain types of student models, collaborative dialogue with a Learning Companion is indeed a useful source of information, and it appears technically feasible. Further research is, however, needed on the design of both information extraction and the Learning Companion.

Understanding a student's knowledge is an important part of adapting the instruction to that individual student. In the area of Intelligent Tutoring Systems this is called Student Modelling.A specific student modelling problem is studied in the situation where a simulator-based learning environment is used to train process operators in diagnosis. An experiment shows that the information necessary for building a student model is revealed in the dialogue between two students collaborating on diagnosing a fault.As a side effect of this investigation a framework for describing student modelling emerged. In this framework student modelling is viewed as the process of bridging the gap between observations of the student and the system's conception of the knowledge to be taught.This thesis proposes the use of a Learning Companion as the collaboration partner. The ensuing dialogue can then be used for student modelling. An analysis of the collaborative dialogue is presented and several important characteristics identified. An architecture is presented and a prototype that reproduces these characteristics is described.