Abstract:

Many of the e-portfolio systems introduced mainly by higher education institutes place importance on storing work samples, such as reports, and records of practical skills and presentations.

However, it is insufficient to promote reflection on student learning and foster student learning in the learning process leading up to creating learning artifacts like work samples. Additionally, it is not easy to externalize what students thought during the learning process of creating them by reflection and store them as e-portfolios. In short, it is extremely difficult to visualize student learning status.

The purpose of this study is to foster students learning in the learning process in e-portfolio systems. Specifically, we focused on metacognitive prompts, developing e-portfolio system functions that provides adaptive metacognitive prompts semi-automatically at the time of storing learning artifacts and implemented them into an e-portfolio system.

We developed e-portfolio system functions that can satisfy the following requirements.
Requirement 1): To work to externalize what students think or notice about learning by promoting reflection on the learning process and eliciting metacognition.
Requirement 2): To work adaptively to promote reflection in accordance with the contents of learning artifacts that students are trying to store.
Requirement 3): To facilitate reflection of what kind of learning process students have followed.

We focused on metacognitive prompt as an approach to satisfy the requirements. Especially, we developed functions that provides adaptive metacognitive prompts semi-automatically to promote reflection of the learning process and elicit metacognition (functions 1) and 2)). In addition, we developed a function that stores records of student’s reflection by answering the prompts provided and visualizing the student’s learning process (function 3)).

Function 1), which is a function to analyze stored learning artifacts, semi-automatically judges the six classifications of learning artifacts and the perfection degree and three conditions of them by selecting from pull-down menus.
Function 2), which is a to analyze stored learning artifacts based on the result of function 1), judges and provides metacognitive prompts adaptively in accordance with the learning artifacts. To provide metacognitive prompts, we extracted the prompt provided and classified the prompt’s phrase. Then, we associated the contents and condition of the learning artifacts with the classified prompts.
Function 3), which is a function to visualize the learning process, visualizes stored learning artifacts and the records that students reflected on using the prompting with functions 1) and 2) associated with them in chronological order on the basis of the condition of learning artifacts of the same kind.

We developed an e-portfolio system as Web applications, which implemented functions 1) to 3). By using our system, it becomes possible to externalize what students thought and enhance their reflection on learning in the learning process using functions 1) and 2). And, it becomes possible to promote reflection on learning and elicit metacognition while grasping one’s own growth of learning by using function 3).

We developed e-portfolio system functions to provide semi-automatic prompts. Results of an evaluation of using our system, we considered that our system was used positively. In the near future, we’ll perform a more detailed evaluation.

Keywords:

Reflection, metacognitive prompts, e-portfolio, learning artifacts, e-portfolio systems, e-learning systems.