Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sherlock is an intelligent tutoring system designed to teach people to build simplified knowledge representations (graphic maps) to facilitate learning of a text. Previous attempts to automate instruction in graphic mapping have had problems because they attempted to diagnose a learner's misunderstandings by looking at a finished graphic map. Sherlock uses a knowledge-based approach to diagnose a leamer's misunderstandings by looking at the knowledge and processes that lead to a learner's graphic map, rather than the completed map. In Sherlock's model a semantic network is used to represent the knowledge in the text. A production system models the strategy for constructing a gniphic map by initiating spreading activation on the semantic network, and interpreting the resulting activation patterns. In a limited evaluation Sherlock was able to correcdy determine if a construction was appropriate 9 6 % of the time.