Applications of simulated students: an exploration
Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
Predicting Students' Performance with SimStudent: Learning Cognitive Skills from Observation
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education: Building Technology Rich Learning Contexts That Work
Layered evaluation of interactive adaptive systems: framework and formative methods
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
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Research in machine learning is making it possible for instructional developers to perform formative evaluations of different curricula using simulated students (VanLehn, Ohlsson & Nason, 1993). Experiments using simulated students can help clarify issues of instructional design, such as when a complex skill can be better learned by being broken into components. This paper describes two formative evaluations using simulated students that shed light on the potential benefits and limitations of mastery learning. Using an ACT-R based cognitive model (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) we show that while mastery learning can contribute to success in some cases (Corbett & Anderson, 1995), it may actually impede learning in others. Mastery learning was crucial to learning success in an experiment comparing a traditional early algebra curriculum to a novel one presenting verbal problems first. However, in a second experiment, an instructional manipulation that contradicts mastery learning led to greater success than one consistent with it. In that experiment learning was better when more difficult problems were inserted earlier in the instructional sequence. Such problems are more difficult not because they have more components but because they cannot be successfully solved using shallow procedures that work on easier problems.