Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Educational software would benefit from question asking facilities that are theoretically grounded in psychology, education, and artificial intelligence. Our previous research has investigated the psychological mechanisms of question asking and has developed a computationally tractable model of human question answering. We have recently developed a Point and Query (P&Q) human-computer interface based on this research. With the P & Q software, the student asks a question by simply pointing to a word or picture element and then to a question chosen from a menu of "good" questions associated with the element. This study examined students' question asking over time, using the P & Q software, while learning about woodwind instruments. While learning, the students were expected to solve tasks that required either deep-level causal knowledge or superficial knowledge. The frequency of questions asked with the P & Q interface was approximately 800 limes the number of questions asked per student per hour in a classroom. The learning goals directly affected the ordering of questions over time. For example, students did not ask deep-level causal questions unless that knowledge was necessary to achieve the learning goal.