Enriching students' laboratory experience: Using software and Socratic methods to foster reflective thought in an engineering laboratory

We have developed SASK (Socratic ASK), a domain-independent and rule-based architecture for implementing Socratic dialogs to foster better learning in well defined tasks by encouraging deeper reflections by the student. We have used SASK to build the Dialysis Mentor, a program that uses Socratic questioning to improve student performance and learning in an undergraduate biomedical engineering lab. Small usability tests and a pilot run in a dialysis lab suggests that Dialysis Mentor and SASK systems in general can improve the value of pre-defined learn-bydoing task experiences. We are now working on improving our SASK Mentors and building authoring tools for them.