Simulating Children Learning and Explaining Elementary Heat Transfer Phenomena: A Multistrategy System at Work

The multistrategy learning system WHY is used as a testbed for investigating a computational cognitive model of conceptual change in children learning elementary physics'. Goal of the simulation is to support the cognitive scientist's investigation of learning in humans. The student's mental model is manually inferred by the cognitive scientist, and by interacting with WHY, from a sequence of interviews collected along a period of eleven teaching sessions. The hypothesized cognitive models are based on a theory of conceptual change, derived from psychology results and educational experiences, which accounts for the evolution of the student's knowledge over a learning period. The multistrategy learning system WHY, able to handle domain knowledge (including a causal model of the domain), has been chosen as tool for the interactive simulation of the cognitive models evolution. The system is able to model both the answers and the causal explanations given by the children. An example of modelisation of an observed conceptual change is provided.

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