ABSTRACT
Learners need information to successfully work on-non-recurrent aspects of-learning tasks and learn from those tasks. This supportive information provides the bridge between what learners already know and what they need to know to work on the learning tasks. It is the information that is typically called ‘the theory’ and which is often presented in study books and lectures. Because the same body of knowledge underlies the ability to perform all learning tasks in the same task class, supportive information is not coupled to individual learning tasks, but rather to task classes as a whole. The supportive information for each subsequent task class is an addition to or an elaboration of the previous supportive information, allowing learners to do new things that they could not do before. Supportive information concerns two types of knowledge. First, it concerns the cognitive strategies that allow one to perform tasks and solve problems in a systematic fashion. A cognitive strategy may be analyzed as a Systematic Approach to Problem Solving (abbreviated as SAP; see Step 5, Chapter 8), which
specifies the phases that an expert typically goes through while carrying out the task as well as the rules-of-thumb that may be helpful to successfully complete each of the phases. An educational or pedagogic specification of a SAP may either be directly presented as supportive information-where the learner studies it as helpful information to perform the learning tasks within one particular task class-or be rewritten into a process worksheet that ‘guides’ the learner through performing a particular task (for an example of this kind of problem-solving support, refer back to Chapter 4.5). In addition to this, supportive information also concerns the mental models that allow one to reason within the task domain. Mental models may be analyzed in different kinds of domain models (see Step 6, Chapter 9) which specify what the different and specific things in a domain are (i.e., *conceptual models*), how they are organized (i.e., *structural models*), and how they work (i.e., *causal models*). Clearly, mental models of how a task domain is organized are only helpful for solving problems if learners also apply useful cognitive strategies. Likewise, cognitive strategies are only helpful if learners possess good mental models of the domain. There is, thus, a bi-directional relationship between cognitive strategies and mental models: The one is of little use without the other. The presentation of SAPs and domain models is discussed in the next sections.
