Study On The Complicated Behavior For Teaching Reform In College By Using Cellular Automata

With the emergence of high-tech and the development of globalization, our country’s higher education has been in a rapid and continuous process of development. As we have obtained great achievement in education in large scale, now we are working toward to the goal of becoming a country with high quality education in the world. But the change has taken place in such a short time without complete preparation and planning, a series of symptoms of inadequacy have occurred. The education system lagged behind the needs of economic development. In order to prevent the problems from getting worse, the government starts planning for short-term and long-term education reform. The goal of teaching reform is to improve the quality, promote fairness. The content of the plan includes teaching method reform and the curriculum reform. In the virtues of constructivism learning theory which has been promoted by top scholars in the world, situational teaching method in our country spread from the early and middle education field gradually to the higher education sector. In the present credit system in colleges and universities on the basis of the course, course selection process and the method of college students learning produce immeasurable knock-on effects.This paper devotes to the study of teaching reform of colleges and universities in two important aspects:Situational teaching method and course management, to improve the teaching quality, and to guarantee the fairness of the education system. At present, in the research of these two objects, scholars often use the method of theoretical analysis, experiment and mathematical modeling method.To our knowledge, scholars have not seriously studied the idea of using the human-computer interaction to test the effects of present teaching methods and course selection methods. Situational teaching and course selection are belong to the category of complex systems, cellular automata happens to be a more mature tool to simulate the social complex systems and complex behavior, our paper is to use cellular automata as a tool to simulate both situational teaching and course selection, hoping to make significant contribution to the research of these two important aspects.Under the guidance of the philosophy of constructivism, first, this paper will analyze the internal and external factors of students group that forms the "construction". Then we will determine how to give the form of the neighbors of cellular; give the definition of boundary; use function expressions to describe the relationship between various influencing factors. Finally we will establish the mathematical model based on cellular automata. By setting up a rich set of evolution rules, our mathematical models will simulate situational teaching process:mainly, we will give mathematical models to simulate the three modes that are very common in the practice of teaching and learning.(These modes are:free exchange without teacher interference mode; free exchange with teacher’s participating mode; and student group discussion mode.) Hopefully, these models will help us to have a clear measure on the effects of the constructivism teaching methods.In the study of course selection, we use the method of psychological analysis, find out the psychological factors that affect students’ course selection, and then use cellular automata to simulate and analyze two extreme cases:1. Courses that are selected by very few students;2. Courses that are interested by most students but without enough spaces. To be more specific, for case1, we will use CA to simulate that how the students are effected by other students and his (or her) own consideration; for case2, our CA models will simulate the existing filter algorithm for course selection; it would help us to find the possible direction of improvements.Through detailed analysis of experimental results, we obtain the following conclusions:(1)The situational teaching method is beneficial to semantic construction of learning group. It can improve the overall learning quality of students in the sense of constructivism learning. Our research shows that1. Generally, it is better to form different learning groups;2. In the practice of situational teaching, the way of how the instructor forms the student groups would be the most important factor. It would have direct impact to the quality of learning. There are two important points in the group construction:First, the leader of each group should be a good student; Secondly, when the instructor distributes students to different groups, he or she should keep a fair average rate of qualification between groups. In addition, if for some reasons, the instructor does not intend to construct learning groups, he or she must interact more often with students.(2)About the study of course selection:1. for the courses that are not popular (case1.), in addition to the personal factors, a student is more easily affected by the classmates surrounding him or her. External factor would have very strong impact on this student and he or she would give up this course.2. For popular courses, the CA simulation shows the similar situation as in the case1. A student is easily affected by the classmates around, he or she would rash to register this course, the register congestion would occur almost for certain. So in this case our suggestion is to give each college a rational quota, meanwhile try to keep a dynamical allocation on the real-time base.In summary, we have introduced a new method of the research in the joint area of computer application and education reform. We apply cellular automata to simulate the dynamical processes of situational teaching; to simulate the course registration management. Our simulations are based on human-computer interaction. The serial figures have shown the internal changes and evolutions of the situational teaching and course registration process. It helps us to have wider and deeper understanding in complex systems and complex behaviors; it also help us to find a new way to solve the problems that possibly would occur in the education reform. We have constructed a psychological flow diagram to show the psychological changes of students in the process of course selection. In addition, we would like to point out that in this joint area, for the first time, we have set up a new and revised version of CA:includes the number of states; use six elements states set to describe the complex psychological states; etc. We believe that our approach are significantly more practical and precise, the human-computer interact CA simulation would more clearly show the spots of insufficiency, and help us to improve the course registration management system.