Mentoring, Metacognition and Music: Interaction Analyses and Implications for Intelligent Learning Environments

This paper reports on an empirical study of the interactive means by which a human teacher supported higher-order, musical thinking in learners. The aim of the work presented here was to create guidelines on how to make practical use of empirical research in teaching agent development. The research overview given in the introduction is followed by an illustrative example of mentoring interactions in musical learning. An elaboration of a musical education problem is then given and a description of the mentoring approach that has been proposed to address this problem is presented. This work uses a theoretical approach to modelling mentoring interactions called the Knowledge Mentoring framework (KMf). An empirical study designed to investigate the musical education problem is reported. In the study, a human teacher attempted to support, in the learners, creative, metacognitive and critical thinking by making use of a specially designed computer-based learning environment called Coleridge. The KMf was used to guide the analysis and modelling of the study interactions. The four main results were a pause taxonomy, reciprocal modelling, seven distinct mentoring stages (with associated state transition networks), and a script of the most frequent mentoring interactions. The last section of the paper presents a discussion of the main implications of these results for Intelligent Learning Environment (ILE) design. (http://aied.inf.ed.ac.uk/members98/archive/vol_9/cook/full.html)