Methods of Modeling and Assisting Causal Understanding in Physical Systems

This paper presents methods for modeling and assisting students’ understanding about causalities between physical quantities based on comparative reasoning. Our tutoring system discusses causalities in an object system with the student by choosing dialogue strategies according to student’s understanding states. The student’s understanding state is represented by the causal network and table. Dialogue strategies are characterized by the following four elements of dialogue; selection of topic, progress of dialogue, granularity of dialogue, and style of utterance. This paper also presents a method of deepening student’s understanding of the object system by comparing it with a similar system which is generated by partitioning or simplifying the original system. The partitioned system has a different causality from the original system, and the simplified system has a similar causality to the original system.