PETTY@RUTGERS.ARPA (03/01/84)
[Forwarded from the Rutgers bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
SPEAKER: Dr. Kurt VanLehn
Xerox Corp.
Palo Alto Research Center
TITLE: "FELICITY CONDITIONS FOR HUMAN SKILL ACQUISITION"
A theory of how people learn certain procedural skills will be
presented. It is based on the idea that the teaching and learning
that goes on in a classroom is like an ordinary conversation. The
speaker (teacher) compresses a non-liner knowledge structure (the
target procedure) into a linear sequence of utterances (lessons). The
listener (student) constructs a knowledge structure (the learned
procedure) from the utterance sequence (lesson sequence). In recent
years, linguists have discovered that speakers unknowingly obey
certain constraints on the sequential form of their utterances.
Apparently, these tacit conventions, called felicity conditions or
conversational postulates, help listeners construct an appropriate
knowledge structure from the utterance sequence. The analogy between
conversations and classrooms suggests that there might be felicity
conditions on lesson sequences that help students learn procedures.
This research has shown that there are. For the particular kind of
skill acquisition studied here, three felicity conditions were
discovered. They are the central hypotheses in the learning theory.
The theory has been embedded in a model, a large AI program. The
model's performance has been compared to data from several thousand
students learning ordinary mathematical procedures: subtracting
multidigit numbers, adding fractions and solving simple algebraic
equations. A key criterion for the theory is that the set of
procedures that the model "learns" should exactly match the set of
procedures that students actually acquire including their "buggy"
procedures. However, much more is needed for psychological validation
of this theory, or any complex AI-based theory, than merely testing
its predictions. Part of the research has involved finding ways to
argue for the validity of the theory.
DATE: Tuesday, March 6, 1984
TIME: 11:30 a.m.
PLACE: Room 323 - Hill Center