Empirical Studies of Procedural Flaws, Impasses, and Repairs in Procedural Skills.
Abstract
This report represents the results of several extensive empirical studies. 925 students who were in the process of learning subtraction were tested using highly diagnostic tests developed by DEBUGGY. Some students were retested two days later to measure the short-term stability of bugs, and others were retested several months later to study long-term stability. All tests were analyzed by DEBUGGY and by several expert diagnosticians in order to assess DEBUGGY'S diagnostic abilities. It was found that DEBUGGY was as good as or better than human diagnosticians at discovering bugs that explain a student's errors. However, a third of the students who committed errors could not be modelled with bugs and slips. Moreover, bugs were found in general to be unstable rather than stable, both in the short term and the long term. These findings challenged the belief that bugs and slips alone could account for procedural error data. Repair Theory was orginally developed as a generative theory of bugs, one that predicted which bugs would exist for a given procedural skill. However, it also predicted that certain kinds of non-bug, non-slip performance would exist, both in the static analyses and the stability data.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 05, 1982
- Accession Number
- ADA113791
Entities
People
- Kurt VanLehn
Organizations
- University of Pittsburgh