A behavioural training system for planning judgment

A tutoring system has been developed to teach effective planning behaviours to practising engineers. The primary didactic strategy is to show concrete examples of effective and ineffective behaviours and require the learner to make inferences about what distinguishes them. This is intended both to provide clear prototypes for behaviours that learners can adopt, and convey the conceptual understanding that learners need in order to justify and adapt these behaviours. The evaluation of the system suggests a strong positive attitude among the learners (professional, graduate engineers) to both the mechanisms and content. Learners found the behavioural examples authentic and benefited from the analogies. But the inductive stages of learning, where the learners are required to make inferences about concrete descriptions of behaviour, were problematic for particular learners on particular behaviours. And the cognitive effort which learners were prepared to devote to induction varied considerably.