Conceptual modelling: How to do it right?

Abstract

Providing individual and immediate feedback in educational situations is a critical factor for improving knowledge and skills acquisition. This is especially important for complex ill-structured learning tasks, i.e. tasks that are characterized by having multiple good solutions (ill-structured), allowing individual learners to follow different routes for achieving the final learning objectives, and having non-evident interactions between the different concepts in the problem domain. Conceptual modelling is an example of such complex learning task as it requires rigorous analytical skills and experience to externalize requirements into high-quality formal representations - conceptual models. These skills are very difficult to teach to novice modellers mainly due to the lack of tools that can continuously guide them in the learning process. In this talk, I will report about the use of automated feedback and simuation to guide the student's learning process for conceptual modelling. Furthermore, lessons from student modelling behaviour as observed from logging the modelling process of students will be presented. The findings include a set of typical modeling and validation patterns that can be used to improve teaching guidance for domain modeling courses. From a scientific viewpoint, the outcomes of the work can be inspirational outside of the area of domain modeling as learning event data is becoming readily available through virtual learning environments and other information systems.