Modeling Individual Differences in Students' Learning Strategies

Learners employ a wide variety of strategies when faced with learning and problem solving in a new domain. The focus of this research is on learners' strategies when studying and explaining instructional materials to themselves prior to problem solving. In the first part of the article, we present results from an empirical study in which the learning and self-explanation strategies of subjects studying instructions embedded in a hypertext environment were contrasted with those from subjects learning with more standard, linear instruction. In the hypertext environment, instruction could be browsed in a nonlinear fashion, and the instructional examples were annotated with explanatory elaborations that students could choose to view. We present a Soar computational model that accounts for results from the study. A particular emphasis of the model was on capturing strategy differences between individual subjects. The general modeling approach involved coupling a model of individual subjects' interaction strate...

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