DESIGN OF AN ITS FOR STRATEGIC KNOWLEDGE IN PROVING LOGICAL FORMULAS

This paper is concerned with an ITS designed for augmenting a student's capability in problem solving. Discussions are concentrated on helping students acquire strategic knowledge and assisting them to build it in their heads. In this paper, many kinds of strategies are treated from a unified point of view. Based on this consideration, a teaching paradigm of strategic knowledge is presented. The paradigm is realized in an ITS as a training environment for strategic knowledge. Assisting students to learn strategic knowledge, the system sets up an appropriate environment and gives them some appropriate advice in each environment. It is realized as a function of giving them appropriate problems and hints about it. In general, strategic knowledge is a kind of heuristics so that it is not easy to describe their application conditions deterministically and explicitly. For this reason, an ITS for strategic knowledge is required to be designed so as to cover not only the case where expertise is represented explicitly as an executable model but also the case where it is represented only implicitly. To realize this teaching paradigm, situation-dependent knowledge called reminding pattern is prepared in the system. It is represented by a triple of a strategy, a situation, and a key symbol in the situation. It denotes that the key usually reminds students of the strategy in the situation. The system gives students problems including positive/negative examples of applications of each strategy in its problem solving process and hints which remind them of an appropriate strategy and makes them resume the problem solving when they fall into an impasse. In this paper, the structure of the system realizing this teaching paradigm is explained in the domain of proving propositional formulas.