In this paper, we study the antecedents of moments of
particularly successful learning while students use a Cognitive
Tutor for geometry. Students used the Cognitive Tutor as part
of their regular classroom activities and data was collected
automatically. Learning moments were operationalized as
when the probability that the student just learned was
extremely high, as determined by a probabilistic model: the
moment-by-moment learning model. The results indicate that
while self-explanation is weakly predictive of learning
moments, contextual guessing and several other factors are
even better predictors of learning moments. These results
suggest that unexpected events in student behavior may be
good predictors of changes in knowledge.