ABSTRACT
The goal of this project is to model a student’s changing knowledge state during cognitive skill acquisition. Our purpose is to predict students’ performance levels and to implement a mastery-based learning environment that enables students to achieve satisfactory performance levels in a minimum period of time. The project assumes a production system model of skill knowledge in which if-then production rules associate problem states and goals with actions and consequences. Our diagnostic goal is to model the student’s knowledge of these rules and to model changes in the student’s knowledge state over time. The project focuses on students learning to write programs in LISP with the assistance of an intelligent computer-based programming tutor. In the following sections we describe the learning environment, the curriculum, the cognitive model, and the learning and performance assumptions. Finally, we discuss our evaluations of the model.
