This article presents the tutoring systems that we have been developing. AUTOTUTOR is a conversational agent, with a talking head, that helps college students learn about computer literacy. ANDES, ATLAS, AND WHY2 help adults learn about physics. Instead of being mere information-delivery systems, our systems help students actively construct knowledge through conversations

Coached problem solving is known to be effective for teaching cognitive skills. Simple forms of coached problem solving are used in many ITS. This paper first considers how university physics can be taught via coached problem solving. It then discusses how coached problem solving can be extended to support two other forms of learning: conceptual learning and meta learning.

Abstract. Schools need assessments of students in order to make informed decisions. The most common assessments are tests consisting of questions or problems that can be answered in under a minute each. When schools change their instruction to maximize performance on short-item tests, the students ’ learning can suffer. To prevent this, assessments are being developed such that “teaching to the test ” will actually improve instruction. Such performance assessments, as they are called, have students work on complex, intrinsically valuable, authentic tasks. Olae is a performance assessment for Newtonian physics. It is based on student modeling, a technology developed for intelligent tutoring systems. Students solve traditional problems as well as tasks developed by cognitive psychologists for measuring expertise. Students work on a computer, which records all their work as well as their answers. This record is analyzed to form a model of the student’s physics knowledge that accounts for the students ’ actions. The model is fine-grained, in that it can report the probability of mastery of each of 290 pieces of physics knowledge. These features make Olae a rather unusual assessment instrument, so it is not immediately obvious how to evaluate it, because standard evaluations methods assume the assessment is a short-item test. This paper describes Olae (focusing on parts of it that have not been described previously), several methods for evaluating complex assessments based on student modeling such as Olae, and some preliminary results of applying these methods to Olae with a small sample of physics students. In many cases, more data would be required in order to adequately access Olae, so this 179 VanLehn & Martin paper should be viewed more as a methodological contribution than as a definitive evaluation.

Experiments investigated whether infants infer that a hidden, freely moving object will move continuously and smoothly. Infants aged 6 and 10 months, like the $-month-old infants in previous experiments, inferred that the object’s path would be connected and unobstructed, in accord with the principle of continuity. In contrast, 4- and 6-month-old infants did not appear to infer that the object’s path would be smooth, in accord with the principle of inertia. At 8 and 10 months, knowledge of inertia appeared to be emerging but remained weaker than knowledge of continuity. These findings are consistent with the view that common sense knowledge of physical objects develops by enrichment around constant core principles. The core knowledge thesis Human adults generally can predict how the things around them will behave. When a ball rolls from view on a table, for example, adults infer that it will continue to exist and to move on a connected path, that it will move smoothly in the absence of obstacles or surface irregularities, that it will rebound from or Supported by grants from NSF (BNS-8613390) and NIH (HD-23103) and by a fellowship to E.S.S. from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. We thank Frank Keil for comments and

Several earlier investigations found that teaching standard textbook physics causes only moderate change in qualitative understanding. Manyinvestigations have tried to explain why teaching textbook physics results in so little learning of qualitativephysics. In contrast, we examined cases where learning did occur and tried to understand them, hoping that this might help us to understand how to support such learning. We developed computerized simulation models of both qualitative, conceptual problem solving and quantitative problem solving and used them to assess changes in students' qualitative knowledge as they learned textbook physics. In many cases, qualitative knowledge has been acquired on the basis of information explicitly presented in the textbook. However, we also found cases where learning of qualitativephysics took place on the basis of information only implicitly addressed in the instruction. Even more important, in various cases this newly acquired qualitative knowledge led to a less frequent use of incorrect qualitative pre-knowledge. This suggests that successfull students did not only learn what has been explicitly presented in the instruction. Rather, they did also learn by deriving and constructing information left implicit in the instruction, relating this information to their pre-knowledge and possibly re#ning and modifying their pre-knowledge in those cases where con#icts became aware.

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In a previous survey (Hake 1998a,b; 2002a) the correlation of the average normalized gain <g>

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Problem solving is central to physics instruction. Results from Physics Education Research (PER), however, demonstrate that traditional ways of teaching with problem solving are inefficient and ineffective for promoting true physics expertise. PER findings give rise to a perspective on physics expertise, learning, and problem solving that can illuminate the reasons why problem solving in traditional instruction fares poorly and suggest remedies. At the heart of the remedies lies a rethinking of the instructional model in which teachers focus less on presenting subject material and more on engineering learning experiences and guiding students ’ learning efforts, while students strive to become active, selfmonitoring constructors of knowledge.

physics instruction