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An intelligent system can provide sufficient collaborative opportunities and support yet fail to be pedagogically effective if the students are unwilling to participate. One of the common ways to assess motivation is using self-report questionnaires, which often do not take the context and the dynamic aspect of motivation into account. To address this, we propose personas, a user-centered design approach. We describe two design iterations where we: identify motivational factors related to students’ collaborative behaviors; and develop a set of representative personas. These personas could be embedded in an interface and be used as an alternative method to assess motivation within ITS. 

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environments are often designed to support collaboration within a single digital platform. However, with the growth of technology in classrooms, students often find themselves working in multiple contexts (i.e., a student might work face-to-face with a peer on one task and then move to engaging in an online discussion for homework). We have created a CSCL environment that aims to support student help-giving across a variety of digital platforms. This paper describes three cycles of a design-based research study that aims to design a system to support help-giving and improve interaction quantity and quality across different contexts as well as to better understand whether students benefit by the addition of multiple contexts. The paper shares major refinements across the three cycles that worked to balance research, pedagogical, and technological goals to improve students’ help-giving behavior in a middle-school mathematics classroom.