Explanation Provision in Knowledge‐Based Systems: A Theory‐Driven Approach for Knowledge Transfer Designs

Knowledge‐Based Systems (KBS) have been used in industry to free experts from mundane and routine decision making, to produce comparable and consistent decisions, and to retain the expertise of knowledgeable employees who may, for many reasons, leave a company. KBS are also desired to have the capacity to transfer knowledge to less‐expert users of such systems. In this paper, Adaptive Character of Thought‐Rational (ACT‐R) theory is used as a foundation for the design of KBS explanations for the explicit purpose of facilitating knowledge transfer to the user. ACT‐R (Anderson 1993) is a theory of cognitive skill acquisition that suggests a learner must first obtain certain facts about a new learning situation (declarative memory pieces) and then convert a series of facts into a set of rules that will produce accurate problem‐solving skills (procedural memory pieces). Prior research has examined pieces of the ACT theory in its earlier forms, but no comprehensive tests examining the simultaneous effect of the...

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