Chapter 17 – Diagnosis

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on diagnosis. The word diagnosis has been used to refer to pedagogical activities aiming at collecting and inferring information about the student or his actions. Because this task often involves the construction of a student model, these activities have also been called student modeling. Behavioral diagnosis only deals with behavior and the product of behavior, without trying to perceive the knowledge state involved in its generation. Epistemic diagnosis deals with the student's knowledge state, including aspects of both the model of the domain and his strategic knowledge. The level concerned with the individual whose behavior and knowledge are of interest to the first two, and includes a wide variety of aspects, is called the level of individual diagnosis. The chapter discusses diagnostic schemes at the behavioral and epistemic levels and describes some of the difficulties involved in diagnosis.