Supporting students in the analysis of case studies for professional ethics education

Abstract

Analyzing case studies in a professional ethics course can be quite challenging for students. To help, we have developed a system called Umka that supports students in this analysis by: (i) directly critiquing the arguments of a student; and (ii) supporting collaboration among multiple students. Umka achieves this support through the interaction of a well-structured interface and the use of latent semantic analysis (LSA). We conducted an experiment, which demonstrated that this cross-interaction of the interface and LSA could be a promising way to "diagnose" a student's argument even without full natural processing. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.