Understanding procedural knowledge for solving arithmetic task by externalization

Abstract

Students build cognitive models for solving a cryptarithmetic task in a learning environment that enables them to formally describe various types of procedural knowledge in a group learning setting in which each student is allowed to refer to the procedural rules described by the other group members. Experimental evaluation showed that: (1) three-quarters of participants successfully constructed valid models with the system, and (2) participants learned to describe procedural knowledge more precisely not only for the training task (cryptarithmetic task) but also for a transfer task (bug identification for a multi-column subtraction problem).