Misconceptions in student's understanding

Tutorial dialogues can be analyzed as an interaction in which a tutor “debugs” a student's knowledge representation by diagnosing and correcting conceptual misunderstandings. In this paper, we outline some tentative steps toward a theory which describes tutorial interactions. We outline the goal structure of a tutor, describe types of conceptual bugs that students have in their understanding of physical processes and discuss some of the representational viewpoints necessary to diagnose and correct these bugs.