Remediation

After students submit a case, their clients get a chance to respond. Mayor Thompson always has an opinion on the choice of claim they made--he's not an expert on geology, so he only comments on how the student's claim will affect the populace. After the first time he gives an opinion on a given claim, he stops appearing.

The co-worker, Chris Baker, has a more technical opinion that changes in response to different sets of evidence presented. Chris comments on several classes of mistakes, including:

• The student has failed to run necessary tests.

• The student has run necessary tests, but hasn't included those results in the report.

• There are misclassified evidence points, which is to say points were dragged in to support a given claim, but in fact they contradict that claim.

• The student has included irrelevant evidence (which might be the fact that there are 20,000 residents living on the volcano--yes, it's true but it isn't useful to prove the claim).

• Special critiques, such as if a student makes a mistake that is evidence of a common misconception students might have. In Volcano, authors built specialized responses for students who haven't done enough investigating before trying to make their case, as well as students who have relied on weak tests, such as doing only visual inspection tests instead of more reliable measures like gas and seismology readings.

In Chris's responses (which are called critiques), he sometimes gives hints on what would make a stronger case, and other times he directs students to questions in the ASK system that might put them on the right track. He is not on film mostly because there are so many different things he might say.

Authors for Volcano, then, needed to look at every piece of evidence that their simulation could produce and divide it into the appropriate categories--necessary, conflicting, irrelevant, or neutral (i.e., it can be included but doesn't need to be) and then write specific critiques to deal with the different kinds of mistakes students could make. Then authors would write Chris's responses up as a list of rules, which are fully described in Chapter 5.