These proceedings include papers on such topics as authoring systems, computer-managed instruction, testing, instructional design, management education, simulations, intelligent computer-assisted instruction, and other areas related to computer-based education. Fifty-six papers and 104 abstracts are organized by Association for the Development of…

Most of the essays in this collection originated as presentations at the University of California, Los Angeles, Conference on Computers and Writing, held in May 1985. Issues addressed in the volume range from concrete, practical considerations (such as designing classroom exercises) to political and theoretical ones (such as the instructor's…

This report describes a project undertaken by Scholastech, a public charity addressing the development needs of computing educators, which was designed to advocate and support the increased use of free software in the college curriculum. The first of five sections provides a brief overview and statement of project objectives, i.e., to serve…

Four conference papers on discourse are included. In "How Context Contributes to the Interpretation of Temporal Expressions," Carlota S. Smith provides a summary analysis of the temporal interpretation of English sentences. Many sentences are shown to be semantically incomplete; it is argued that information from neighboring sentences is…

An intensive, naturalistic study tracked one six year old's learning for six months and more. The study was inspired by the hope that with concepts of Artificial Intelligence and sufficiently detailed observation, the path of knowledge development could be described through observing significant learning experiences. Included is a reasonably…

Research and development work on the use of the SCHOLAR autotutorial, online system is described. Inference strategies used within the system are deductive, negative, and functional in character. A graphics package allows user to ask questions and give commands in English to control SCHOLAR's map display capability. The examples shown are for…

Students' conceptions of three major artificial intelligence concepts used in the modeling of systems in science, fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms were investigated before and after a higher education science course. Students initially explored their prior ideas related to the three concepts through active tasks. Then,…

The rule space model permits measurement of cognitive skill acquisition, diagnosis of cognitive errors, and detection of the strengths and weaknesses of knowledge possessed by individuals. Two ways to classify an individual into his or her most plausible latent state of knowledge include: (1) hypothesis testing--Bayes' decision rules for minimum…

This paper describes a study that was undertaken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to compare the databases selected by 75 inexperienced student online searchers aided by an existing gateway system--INFOMASTER, a version of EASYNET--with databases selected manually by four experienced searchers who were reference librarians from…

This paper introduces a probabilistic model that is capable of diagnosing and classifying cognitive errors in a general problem-solving domain. Item response theory is used to deal with the variability of response errors. Responses from a 38 item fraction addition test given to 595 junior high school students are used to illustrate the model.…

Problem solving is viewed as an increasing area of interest that focuses on the theory, research, and teaching of general cognitive skills which are applicable to broad problem classes. This document gives an overview of some important aspects of the theory and research in order to identify what general cognitive skills ought to be taught. Modern…

A theory of how people learn certain procedural skills is presented. It is based on the idea that the teaching and learning that goes on in a classroom is like an ordinary conversation. The speaker (teacher) compresses a non-linear knowledge structure (the target procedure) into a linear sequence of utterances (lessons). The listener (student)…

In order to build robust natural language processing systems that can detect and recover from miscommunication, the investigation of how people communicate and how they recover from problems in communication described in this artificial intelligence report focused on reference problems which a listener may have in determining what or whom a…

Information processing researchers have assumed that algebra symbol skills depend on mastery of the abstract rules presented in the curriculum (Matz, 1980; Sleeman, 1986). Thus, students' ubiquitous algebra errors have been taken as indicating the need to embed algebra in rich contextual settings (Kaput, 1995; National Council of Teachers of…

Data from two studies in which subjects were classified as successful or unsuccessful were analyzed using neural net technology after being analyzed with a linear regression function. Data were obtained from admission records of 201 students admitted to undergraduate and 285 students admitted to graduate programs. Data included grade point…