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.