Artificial Intelligence - Special volume on qualitative reasoning about physical systems
Relevance: communication and cognition
Relevance: communication and cognition
Readings in qualitative reasoning about physical systems
Readings in qualitative reasoning about physical systems
Qualitative models of interactions between two populations
AI Communications - Binding Environmental Sciences and Artificial Intelligence
Bringing Qualitative Reasoning Models into the Classroom for Scientific Education of Deaf Students
Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education: Building Learning Systems that Care: From Knowledge Representation to Affective Modelling
Evaluating the use of qualitative reasoning models in scientific education of deaf students
AIED'11 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Artificial intelligence in education
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Making inferences is crucial for understanding the world. The school may develop such skills but there are few formal opportunities for that. This paper describes an experiment designed to investigate the use of qualitative reasoning models to support deaf students in making inferences about the behaviour of populations in interactions such as commensalism, amensalism, and predation. The experiment was done in two sessions. In both, the teacher presented the concepts, which were translated to the signed language, and at the end the students answer to a test, consisting of objective questions and a written essay. In the second session qualitative models about the same types of interactions were used to show the structure of the two populations system and the dynamics of the system over time. Statistical analysis showed that the use of qualitative models had a significant positive effect on the performance of the students. They gave more correct answers to objective questions and produced less trivial conclusions in their essays. We are confident that qualitative models have an important role to play in their scientific education and in the acquisition of Portuguese as a second language.