Theoretical Background

Our research is based on both learning and design theories. CAIA is built on the foundation that students can learn about financial information concerning college given the proper opportunities.

Learning Theory

Inquiry Learning (Dewey, 1916)

"If students can participate in inquiry learning then they will be participating in the learning itself."

While college finance can be a vast and overwhelming topic, we believe that students will learn more through inquiry based learning. Students should be able to investigate information that is of interest or necessity to them at a particular time and to learn by discovering new information that they know is important. This learning theory guided to two driving factors of our design - (1) to make an interactive learning environment for students and (2) to provide students with information that is most relevant to their lives. To address these areas, we created our prototype as a natural language interface so students can simply speak to the computer, and adopted the concept of a "learner model" that would allow for information to be delivered only when appropriate. We do acknowledge, that especially in this area, students do not know everything that they need to know. For this reason, we have also stressed that the system is meant to complement, and not replace, sessions with a school counselor.

Exposure to Information (Plank & Jordan, 2001)

Low-income students and their parents tend to make decisions based on "incomplete or inaccurate information" (p. 950) about college finances, supporting the misconception that they cannot afford to attend a post-secondary school.

The research done across a series of studies from Plank and Jordan over the past decade influenced our selection of target learner's. Although CAIA would certainly be useful, our target learners are low-income students because they do not have any way to get the resources they need, or if they can, those resources are so incomprehensible that they result in misconceptions about college. The largest of these misconceptions (according to several studies in our reference section) are around college finances, particularly a fear of debt. These studies prompted us to focus the content of our initial prototype on financial information, to address the most significant concerns of our target learners.

Design Theory

Cognitive Engineering (Norman, 1982)

In designing CAIA, we plan to use a user-centered design approach. The initial design of our user interface will address two main goals of cognitive engineering:

To understand the fundamental principles behind human action and performance that are relevant for the development of engineering principles of design.
To devise systems that are pleasant to use - the goal is neither efficiency nor ease nor power, although these are all to be desired, but rather systems that are pleasant, even fun.

In designing CAIA, we heavily consulted with major stakeholder groups, including high school students, school counselors, and professors, as well as experts in human-computer interaction design. Our user testing at College Track showed that we had managed to create an enjoyable system, made evident by the enthusiasm of the students who were a part of our study.

Focus on Interactivity (Forrester Research, 2000)

In 2000, Forrester Research conducted a study about online training in corporate environments. While this may not seem directly applicable to the design of CAIA, the counselor-to-student relationship is very similar in nature to the manager-to-employee relationship. Therefore, when this study examined what the biggest obstacles were to effectively mimicking this relationship in an online environment, we found it to be very relevant to our design. The chart on the right shows that interactivity was found to be the largest obstacle to effective online training. This served to solidify our resolve to creating an enjoyable interaction for students that would allow them to get the most out of their counseling experience.