Teaching Scientific Reasoning Skills in Physics: Students and Computers Coaching Each Other

理科课程的学生通常得到的指导太少，无法可靠地学习所需的推理技能。因此，许多学生无法获得灵活可用的科学知识(即使是使用现代精心设计的教学和材料)。此外，学生往往缺乏复杂智力任务所需的一些基本认知能力(例如，做出深思熟虑的决定或充分评估自己的表现)。这个项目的目标是通过以下方法改进科学教学：1.使用认知分析来具体说明有效应用科学概念或原理以及解决问题所需的程序性知识。2.帮助学生学习这些程序性知识，明确教授他们决定行动、实施行动和评估结果的基本认知功能。3.要做到这一点，可以采用“互惠教学策略”(在阅读教学中非常有效)，学生和导师交换角色，交替(A)决定和评估或(B)实施。4.开发新的计算机程序(“PALS”，即学习的个人助理)，可以扮演导师的角色--这样学生和计算机就可以相互指导。这样的朋友，涉及精心的教学设计，而不是人工智能，可以为每个学生提供良好的个人指导和反馈。(初步实验表明，这样的PAL可能达到接近专家人类导师的教学效果。)这项工作预计将导致以下结果：1.产生在基础物理中具有良好的教学效果和实用价值的PAL。2.在物理和其他领域发展PAL的有效方法。3.增加对相关认知和人机交互过程的理解。

Students in science courses often receive far too little guidance to allow reliable learning of needed reasoning skills. As a result, many students fail to acquire flexibly usable scientific knowledge (even with modern well-designed instruction and materials). Furthermore, students often lack some basic cognitive abilities needed for complex intellectual tasks (e.g., making well-considered decisions or adequately assessing their own performance). The goals of this project are to improve science instruction by the following approach: 1. Use cognitive analyses to specify the procedural knowledge needed for effectively applying scientific concepts or principles and for solving problems. 2. Help students learn such procedural knowledge, teach them explicitly the basic cognitive functions of deciding on an action, implementing it, and assessing the result. 3. Do this by adapting a "reciprocal-teaching strategy" (very effective in teaching reading) where a student and tutor trade roles, alternately (a) deciding and assessing or (b) implementing. 4. Develop novel computer programs ("PALs", i.e., Personal Assistants for Learning) that can play the role of the tutor--so that students and computers coach each other. Such PALs, which involve careful instructional design but no artificial intelligence, can provide every student with good individual guidance and feedback. (Preliminary experiments suggest that such PALs might achieve instructional effectiveness approaching that of expert human tutors.) This work is expected to lead to the following results: 1. Production of PALs of demonstrated instructional efficacy and utility in basic physics. 2. Effective methods for developing PALs, in physics as well as in other domains. 3. Increased understanding of relevant cognitive and human-computer interaction processes.