Using Qualitative Simulation to Generate Explanations

An important goal of a computer aided instruction system is to provide students with understandable explanations . Generating explanations requires that the instructional system must itself have some understanding of the topic, prefereably close to the kind the student should have . There is a growing amount of evidence that human understanding of physical systems is based on qualitative models of those systems . This evidence comes from psychological studies [Larkin, McDermott, Simon 6 Simon, 1980, Stevens, Collins S Goldin, 19791 and is suppported by successes in artificial intelligence in actually constructing systems that reason about physical situations using qualitative models [deKleer, 1979a, Forbus, 1980].