Learning Activity and Instructional Setting
In general, a student is presented by an ITS program with some question
or problem that he or she must solve—a form of “learning by doing.”
A great deal of ITS research since 1990 has explored different kinds and
aspects of a learning activity: the setting (e.g.,
“job-embedded” tutors; museum displays), media (e.g., web-based
presentations; virtual worlds with role-playing simulations; animated
agents), instructional mode (e.g., “collaborative inquiry”),human-machine interaction (e.g., recognizing and conveying
emotion; speech understanding), theories of learning , a central
theme in the “learning sciences” (e.g., cognitive processes, situated
learning, apprenticeship), educational data-mining (e.g.,
learning patterns from web-based databases of student performance), andsupporting teachers (e.g., calling attention to a student
requiring remedial work).
Woolf [27] surveyed recent perspectives about ITS applications,
emphasizing interactive approaches in which the student is not just a
passive recipient of instruction, aka “active learning.” Clancey and
Soloway [13] edited a journal, Interactive Learning
Environments , which also emphasized theory-based design of an
instructional setting and the role of viewing and manipulating media in
the learning process.