The role of schemata in concept acquisition and diagnosis

Abstract

A module of automatic cognitive diagnosis has been constructed in the framework of a tutorial system for transmission of knowledge through language. It takes responses of students trying to characterize newly acquired concepts and evaluates them. The module contains a syntactico-semantic analyzer, a summarizer-schematizer, and an evaluator. It uses a conceptual base of knowledge organized in a hierarchy of schemata. This paper presents an important class of such schemata, concerning scientific phenomena, more specifically those in the field of animal behavior. They contain information on the entities or relations involved in the concept, their successive states, and times. They are represented in an attribute-value format. They are implemented by insertion of their components in the semantic part of the dictionary associated with the analyser. When processing a particular student response the system constructs from these schemata both a representation in working memory of the target concept and an instantiated representation of the response. Comparison of these two representations yields a diagnosis of the corresponding individual concept.