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An Experiment in Students' Acquisition of Problem Solving Skill from Goal-Oriented Instructions

Authors:
Matej Guid
Jana Krivec
Ivan Bratko

Keywords: cognitive models; procedural knowledge; procedural chunks; problem solving; perception; memory; chess

Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate experimentally the efficacy of semi-automatically constructed instructions for solving problems that require search. The instructions give advice to the student, in terms of what sub-goals should be attempted next in the process of solving a problem. Our chosen experimental problem domain was the chess endgame of checkmating with bishop and knight, which occasionally presents difficulties even to chess grandmasters. Our subjects, little more than complete beginners, were given the task of learning to win this endgame by studying the instructions. We were interested in two questions: (1) How effective were the goal-oriented instructions as an aid to the student towards mastering this domain? (2) What was the form of the students' "internal representation" of the acquired knowledge? The latter question was studied by our method for automatically identifying so-called procedural chunks from the students' games. Given the simplicity of the chunk detection method, the reconstructed chunks of students' acquired knowledge reflected the goal structure of the instructions amazingly well.

Pages: 159 to 164

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: July 22, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4197

ISBN: 978-1-61208-218-9

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from July 22, 2012 to July 27, 2012