ABSTRACT
The computer’s potential to diagnose students’ misconceptions in their learning processes has far-reaching implications for the field of education. Brown and Burton (1978) developed a program called Debuggy that would diagnose student errors in subtraction. Ohlsson and Langley (1985) also developed a general diagnostic system called DPF that was supplied with the subtraction “problem space” and was then compared to Debuggy. Johnson (1985) constructed a program called PROUST that could detect and isolate certain types of semantic bugs in students’ Pascal programs. This paper looks at the strengths and weaknesses of these programs, compares them, and suggests an alternative approach to arithmetic diagnosis using a computer. A preliminary case study will be presented as evidence for the need of this new system.
