Performance assessment is an important task in all levels of education, both as input for identifying remedial needs of individual students and for improving general quality of education. Although explicit assessment measures can be obtained through objective standardized testing, it is much more difficult to capture fuzzier, or tacit, performance…

The cognitive revolution began in the 1950s as researchers began to move away from the study of knowledge acquisition and behaviorism to the study of information and the way it is processed. Four factors are discussed in chapter 1 as contributing to the increase in popularity of the "cognitive revolution" (increasing enthusiasm for the…

This paper begins with background on intelligent agents (software programs built to perform certain specific tasks for the user). A taxonomy that categorizes intelligent agents by the degree of intelligence embedded in the software is presented. Applications of today's intelligent agents are discussed, including specific examples of the following:…

This paper outlines work on a class of systems called Personal Information Management Assistants (PIMAs). PIMAs observe user interaction with everyday applications and use these observations to anticipate a user's information needs. They then automatically fulfill these needs by accessing Internet information sources, filtering the results, and…

This publication contains revised versions of the major papers presented at a research conference on the learning and teaching of algebra. The papers and discussions focused on four major themes: what is algebra and what should it become, in light of continuing technological advances; what has research told us about the teaching and learning of…

This paper begins by examining concepts of artificial intelligence (AI) and discusses various definitions of the concept that have been suggested in the literature. The nesting relationship of expert systems within the broader framework of AI is described, and expert systems are characterized as knowledge-based systems (KBS) which attempt to solve…

The first of two volumes in these proceedings contains the text (or, in a few cases, an abstract) of 60 papers on the use of technology at all levels of education, including elementary, secondary, and higher education. These papers were presented in 44 topic sessions by delegates representing more than 30 nations. Themes of the sessions include:…

This report illustrates one way in which the technologies of testing might combine with cognitive science techniques to help steer instruction. Steering testing is brief diagnostic testing that steers, or individualizes, the course of instruction. Steering testing uses simple heuristics for reasoning about the level of a student's competence in a…

The purpose of this research project was the development and initial validation of Mandate Consultant, an expert system that provides a second opinion of the appropriateness of the decision-making process used in the development of Individualized Education Programs with handicapped children. (Expert systems are a development of artificial…

The design of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) in a knowledge domain where expertise is modeled as a set of uncertain and incomplete beliefs that are justifiable and expressible in the form of a critical argument is outlined. Issues concerning knowledge communication in a tutorial interaction are discussed with reference to a cognitive model…

This document--intended to help technology education teachers plan their classroom curriculum for secondary school and college students--contains units on creativity, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, polymeric materials, manufacturing in space, metallic materials, intermodal transportation, and food production. The sociocultural impact of…

This report summarizes the proceedings of a conference held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education which focused on the conceptual distinction between microworld software and expert system software in education. Microworld software is defined as software which lacks a specific teaching and learning agenda, and expert systems as software that…

This report is a collection of 11 recent papers by the Human-Machine Interaction Group at the University of California, San Diego. The following papers are included: (1) "Stages and Levels in Human-Machine Interaction," Donald A. Norman; (2) "The Nature of Expertise in UNIX," Stephen W. Draper; (3) "Users in the Real…

Three research efforts that used computer-based simulations for maintenance training were in progress when this report was written: Game-Based Learning, which investigated the use of computer-based games to train electronics diagnostic skills; Human Performance in Fault Diagnosis Tasks, which evaluated the use of context-free tasks to train…

Expert reasoning in the natural sciences appears to make extensive use of a relatively small number of general principles and reasoning strategies, each associated with a larger number of more specific inference patterns. Using a dual declarative hierarchy to represent strategic and factual knowledge, a framework for a robust scientific reasoning…