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

科学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（即使有现代设计良好的教学和材料）。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）。 本研究的目的是通过以下途径来改善科学教学：1.使用认知分析来指定有效应用科学概念或原则以及解决问题所需的程序知识。 2.帮助学生学习这样的程序性知识，明确地教给他们决定行动、实施行动和评估结果的基本认知功能。 3.要做到这一点，可以采用一种"互惠教学策略"（在阅读教学中非常有效），即学生和导师交换角色，交替地（a）决定和评估或（B）实施。 4.开发新颖的计算机程序（"PAL"，即，个人学习助理），可以扮演导师的角色--这样学生和计算机就可以互相指导。这种PAL涉及精心的教学设计，但没有人工智能，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，这种PAL可能会达到接近人类专家导师的教学效果。 本研究的主要成果如下：1.生产在基础物理中证明教学效果和实用性的PAL。 2.在物理学和其他领域开发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.