Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Student models are important for guiding the development of instructional systems. An approach to constructing student models is reviewed. The approach advocates constructing student models in two steps: (1) develop a descriptive theory of correct and buggy student responses, then (2) develop a process theory of the way students actually generate those responses. The approach has been used in the domain of introductory programming. A status report is provided: (1) Goal-And-Plan (GAP) trees have been developed to describe student program variations, and (2) a Generate-Test-and-Debug (GTD) impasse/repair architecture has been developed to model the process of student program generation.