View source for Blending layers of CUMULATE's user model

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This work is focused on mutual influence of heterogeneous user activity types (reading texts, viewing examples, and solving problems) on user's knowledge of some educational domain. Ordinarily [[CUMULATE]]'s considers them separately by classifying them to modeling tiers or levels, each corresponding to a level of [http://www.officeport.com/edu/blooms.htm| Bloom's taxonomy] of intellectual behavior. Great part of this work is devoted on cross-tier user modeling. Namely, how user activity can (positively) influence on another/other layer(s).

== Study 1 ==
In this study we have inspected the influence of the comprehension layer of [[CUMULATE]]'s user model (viewing examples) on the application layer (solving problems). Our approach was to create "blends" of problem-solving tier of the user model and weighted (from 0 to 1, with .1 step) example viewing tier Our hypotheses were that:
* Using example browsing activity when modeling problem solving improves model accuracy
* Different users benefit from different “blends” of user model levels
In addition we wanted to se if
* There is a single optimal blend for all users, and. or
* Classes of users benefitting from different model blends can be determined

=== Data ===
We were using previously collected student [[CUMULATE_Usage_Logs#Database_Management_6_Course_Dataset|usage logs]] collected from 4 Database Management courses offered during Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 semesters at the [http://www.pitt.edu University of Pittsburgh] and [http://www.dcu.ie Dublin City University]. Each course had roughly the same structure, an identical set of 48 problems served by [[SQLKnoT]] system, and an identical set of 64 examples served by [[WebEx]] system. Basic usage statistics are given in the table below.

{|  border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 
| School
| Semester
| Level
| No. of users
| Avg. problem attempts
| Avg. example views
|  valign=top | Avg. distinct problems
|  valign=top | Avg. distinct examples
|- 
|  valign=top | U. of Pitt
|  valign=top | Fall 2007
|  valign=top | U*
|  valign=top | 27
|  valign=top | 156.40
|  valign=top | 189.00
|  valign=top | 29.96
|  valign=top | 32.07
|- 
|  valign=top | U. of Pitt
|  valign=top | Fall 2007
|  valign=top | G
|  valign=top | 20
|  valign=top | 61.70
|  valign=top | 104.70
|  valign=top | 29.95
|  valign=top | 29.10
|- 
|  valign=top | U. of Pitt
|  valign=top | Spring 2008
|  valign=top | U
|  valign=top | 15
|  valign=top | 26.94
|  valign=top | 46.65
|  valign=top | 16.35
|  valign=top | 10.29
|- 
|  valign=top | DCU
|  valign=top | Spring 2008
|  valign=top | U
|  valign=top | 52
|  valign=top | 81.68
|  valign=top | 257.25
|  valign=top | 22.82
|  valign=top | 38.63
|}

=== Procedures ===