Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People use a wide variety of devices. Operation of a device can usually be described in terms of knowledge of specific procedural sequences. However, execution of procedures may also depend upon knowledge of the device, its behaviour, and the relationships between device features and device actions. A video cassette recorder (VCR) is one commonly used device. Programming a VCR to automatically record a chosen television program is an example of a device manipulation task. In designing a device tutor, it is relevant to ask how instruction about device operation should be designed, and to ask whether knowledge engineering for a device tutor should focus on procedural knowledge or involve factual and referential knowledge as well. Four versions of a tutoring system for the VCR device and programming task have been implemented, incorporating different tutorial approaches using different types of knowledge. The effectiveness of these versions has been examined experimentally. Subjects who used the knowledgeable tutoring version learned to program a VCR simulation using fewer steps and with fewer errors and error types than subjects who used a prompting version of the tutor.