Computer Aided Tracing of Children?s Physics Learning: a Teacher Oriented View

For an effective Teacher-Student interaction, the Teacher has to maintain a constant understanding of "what is going on" in the Student's mind. When coming to Physics, the Teacher's ability to propose and to relate explanations at different levels of abstraction as a chains of causal interactions (deep) or as a set of observable phenomena (shallow) may determine a successful and lasting learning in the Student. Here, we describe a knowledge representation to be used by the teacher to depict to herself the student's mental model and to tune her future lessons according to the current student comprehension. Supported by a cognitive theory of children physics learning, we used the system WHY for modeling the evolution of a student's learning as it appeared at the teacher's eyes. Two of WHY's features turned out to be essential: (a) to deal with explanations having different levels of abstraction, and (b) the possibility to continuously evaluate the coherence of the hypothesized learner's model with respect to her explanation. In the long term, the work's outcome might contribute to the development of teaching assistant systems that support the teacher in identifying "what has to be explained next".