Skill Acquisition and the LISP Tutor

Abstract

An analysis of student learning with the LISP tutor indicates that while LISP is complex, learning it is simple. The key to factoring out the complexity of LISP is to monitor the learning of the 500 productions in the LISP tutor which describe the programming skill. The learning of these productions follows the power‐law learning curve typical of skill acquisition. There is transfer from other programming experience to the extent that this programming experience involves the same productions. Subjects appear to differ only on the general dimensions of how well they acquire the productions and how well they retain the productions. Instructional manipulations such as remediation, content of feedback, and timing of feedback are effective to the extent they give students more practice programming, and explain to students why correct solutions work.

A Programming Tutor for Haskell

“…The Lisp tutor [Anderson et al, 1986] is an intelligent tutoring system that supports the incremental construction of Lisp programs. At any point in the development a student can only take a single next step, which makes the interaction style of the tutor a bit restrictive.…”

Integrating Assessment and Instruction: A Research and Development Agenda

“…Anderson's work exemplifies the second (see Anderson, 1988;Anderson, Boyle, & Reiser, 1985;Anderson, Boyle, & Yost, 1985;Anderson, Conrad, & Corbett, 1989). Of course, mixtures of principles from each tradition are possible (see Frederiksen & White, 1990); there might be free exploration coupled with critical advisory feedback.…”

Conceptual Modelling in Error Analysis in Computer-Assisted Language Learning Systems

“…In the buggy models the rules that account for the learner's nonstandard performance are usually drawn from a set of known possible rules, usually called a bug catalogue. This approach has been used in subject areas such as subtraction [6], fractions [29], and Lisp programming [2]. The development of the bug catalogues -which can run into several hundred rules -has been very labour-intensive.…”