A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Toward a New Science of Instruction: Programmatic Investigations in Cognitive Science and Education--August 1993

Intelligent Tutoring System Enriches Microworlds

Though Glaser and Schauble's computer microworlds were developed at NRCSL for research purposes--that is, as stimuli for student reasoning and not as teaching tools their classroom potential is clear from the amount of learning that research subjects were able to achieve with them. This potential has been enhanced by an intelligent computer program called Discovery and Reflection Notation (DARN) that helps students to evaluate their own experimentation strategies as they apply them. As Schauble explains, DARN provides graphical traces of the learner's progress and reasoning in relation to a given experimental strategy that the learner has entered. The program provides three views of the student's experimental activity, and any of the three can be called up by the learner at any point in an experiment or series of experiments.

The first view of a student's experimental progress that DARN provides --the "student view"--is a purely descriptive account of the steps the learner has taken in carrying out her strategy. But it is a high-level description in that it shows her, in an expandable box on the screen, whether her experiments relate to the strategy she has entered, whether she has made predictions, whether they were correct, which data management tools she has used, whether she has made hypotheses, and whether they have been accepted by the computer or she has been asked to do further work.

The second view, the "plan view," shows the logical relation of a series of experiments to the plan the student has entered. It analyzes whether she has followed the plan through to its conclusion or jumped to another plan in mid-path, and its design is intended specifically to foster some of the mindful, self-regulatory skills that account for a persistent and systematic approach to a problem. The third view, the "expert's eye view," also aims to model a kind of self-regulatory skill for students. It keeps track of the data generated by students and--if it detects enough evidence to justify a conclusion they have failed to make--prods them to review their evidence for possible missed connections.

Thus, DARN is one example of an instructional aid that can emerge from the richly specific findings of one line of deep cognitive research. It arose directly from Glaser and Schauble's observations of differences between better and poorer learners, and it represents their attempt to raise the poorer learners' level of mindfulness from a strictly procedural attention to their activities--which loses sight of their general goal--to a level at which they stay focused on planning experiments, making predictions, manipulating variables, and tracking results. These, say Schauble, "are the things that actually have to do with the different conceptual pieces of experimentation."
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