Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

is study set out to apply a model of situated discourse to analyze tutorial dialogue in a complex well-defined domain of problem solving in engineering. One tutor met individu?ally with three students to teach them to solve shear force and bending moments problems. The participants' discourse and actions were analyzed according to a situated discourse model. Quantitative analyses of the tutorial dialogue af?firmed that the constraints on situated discourse processing identified in the model predicted the propositional content and conversational functions of utterances produced by both the tutor and the students. Qualitative analysis of the concep?tual content of the tutor's dialogue for Problem 1 revealed several distinct types of situation models that constituted the meaning associated with the situated discourse and action. The students initially (Problem 1) received this information, their participation consisting mostly of observing, and par?ticipating in low-level algebraic procedures with tutorial guidance. Students' problem solving and dialogue on subse?quent problems (2 and 3) displayed their ability to solve problems with some tutorial assistance. These results dem?onstrate that analysis of tutorial dialogue from the standpoint of cognitive models of discourse processing can provide de?tailed information about the conceptual situation models in?volved, and the cognitive processes used by the participants.