Investigating Student Choices in Performing Higher-Level Comprehension Tasks Using TED

The current paper describes a first experiment in the use of TED talks and open tagging exercises to train higher-level comprehension skills, and of automatic logging of the student's actions to investigate the student choices while performing analytical tasks. The experiment took advantage of an interactive learning platform--LearnWeb--that integrates TED talk videos and transcripts and enriches them with tagging features and a data logging system. The data collected offered an answer to the following questions: Which of the three tasks was perceived by the students as more difficult? How was each task faced by the students? How did the logs contribute to an understanding of the students' approaches to the tasks? The experiment also suggested ideas for further development of LearnWeb's log features from a pedagogical and research perspective. [For the complete volume of short papers, see ED572005.]