My research extends work done at the CMU PACT Center on cognitive tutors for mathematics education.
Cognitive tutors are intelligent software programs designed to help students as they learn by doing.
Also, the software monitors students' skill level, selects appropriate problems, and makes advancement decisions. The central component of a cognitive tutor is a cognitive model of the skills to be taught. Cognitive tutors have been remarkably successful in raising high school students' math scores. In order to improve them further, we investigate what kind of student-tutor interactions foster learning with understanding, as reflected for example by an ability to deal with problems that are different from those encountered during training. In recent studies in a Pittsburgh-area high school, we found fairly suggestive evidence that students learn with greater understanding if the cognitive tutoring software requires them not just to find solutions, but also to explain their solution steps.