ABSTRACT

CELIA is a computational model of how a novice student can quickly become competent at a procedural task through observing and understanding an expert’s problem solving. This model was inspired by protocol studies, and implemented in a computer program. This model of a student’s effective learning suggests some implications for teaching novices in a new domain. These may be relevant for both human teaching and intelligent tutoring. The implications include: encourage the student to predict, interactive step-by-step presentation of example steps, encourage self-explanation by the student, order example steps to match their logical order, give a variety of examples in early instruction, allow flexible interaction with the student, and present basic background concepts prior to examples. These implications represent hypotheses that follow from the learning model; they suggest further research.