A goal of second-generation expert systems is to supply knowledge engineers with common frameworks to develop expert systems, thus, eliminating the need to build entirely new systems for each application. A mechanism is a unit of problem-solving knowledge from which such a framework can be developed. We define what a mechanism is and how it can be engineered to compose models of problem solving...

Different kinds of problem solving methods exist for different kinds of problems. One can recognize two kinds of problems: optimization ones, for which a solution can be found by adjustment of the value of problem parameters; and inventive problems, for which no solution is known. This problem insolvability can be due to the lack of a “good” solving algorithm or to a non adequate problem repres...

In collaborative problem solving, metacognition not only covers strategic reasoning related to the task but also reasoning related to the interaction itself. The hypothesis underlying this work states that regulation of the interaction and regulation of the task are closely related mechanisms and that their co-occurrence facilitates collaborative problem solving. These assumptions are tested ex...

Researchers and teachers are increasingly in agreement that classrooms should adopt more open-ended, ill-structured, creative problem solving pedagogies (Kapur, 2008). However, we lack sufficient understandings of how to assess the variegated outputs of learning activities that afford students considerable discretion over what they will produce, and of the mechanisms through which group work ca...

The analysis of problem-solving activities carried out by students in learning settings involves studying the students’ actions and assessing the solutions they have created. This analysis constitutes an ideal starting point to support an automatic intervention in the student activity by means of feedback or other means to help students build their own knowledge. In this paper, we present a mod...

In ill-structured tasks, the problem to be solved is poorly specified and there is no unique correct solution. Most evidence on brain mechanisms involved in dealing with such tasks comes from neuropsychology. Here, we developed an ill-structured design task suitable for testing in a functional neuroimaging environment and compared it with a matched well-structured problem-solving task using fMR...