Dietrich Albert - Böcker

Based on the formal concept of "knowledge structures" originally proposed by Jean-Claude Falmagne and Jean-Paul Doignon, this book contains descriptions of methodological developments and experimental investigations as well as applications for various knowledge domains. The authors address three main topics: * theoretical issues and extensions of Doignon & Falmagne's theory of knowledge structures; * empirical validations of specific problem types and knowledge domains, such as sentence comprehension, problem solving in chess, inductive reasoning, elementary mathematical reasoning, and others; and * application of knowledge structures in various contexts, including knowledge assessment, intelligent tutoring systems, and motor learning. Unlike most other approaches in the literature in cognitive psychology, this book provides both a rigorous mathematical formulation of knowledge-related psychological concepts and its empirical validation by experimental data.

Based on the formal concept of "knowledge structures" originally proposed by Jean-Claude Falmagne and Jean-Paul Doignon, this book contains descriptions of methodological developments and experimental investigations as well as applications for various knowledge domains. The authors address three main topics: * theoretical issues and extensions of Doignon & Falmagne's theory of knowledge structures; * empirical validations of specific problem types and knowledge domains, such as sentence comprehension, problem solving in chess, inductive reasoning, elementary mathematical reasoning, and others; and * application of knowledge structures in various contexts, including knowledge assessment, intelligent tutoring systems, and motor learning. Unlike most other approaches in the literature in cognitive psychology, this book provides both a rigorous mathematical formulation of knowledge-related psychological concepts and its empirical validation by experimental data.

This book is a sign of its times. Each one of the chapters - papers written by European authors of various backgrounds- illustrates a departure from the style of theorizing that has been prominent in the behavioral and social sciences for most of the century. Until very recently, models for behavioral phenomena were chi~fly based on numerical representations of the objects of concern, e. g. the subjects and the stimuli under study. This was due in large part to the influence of nineteenth century physics, which played the role of the successful older sister, the one that had to be imitated if one wished to be taken seriously in scientific circles. The mystical belief that there could be science only when the objects of concern were susceptible of measurement in the sense of physics was a credo that could not be violated without risks. Another, more honor­ able justification was that the numerical models were the only ones capable of feasible calculations. (In fact, these models were typically linear. ) An early example of such theorizing in psychology is factor analysis, which attempted to represent the results of mental tests in a real vector space of small dimen­ sionality, each subject being represented by a point in that space. A dimension Wa£ interpreted as a scale measuring some mental ability. The analysis was simple, and only required an electrical desk calculator (with spinning wheels), and a suitable amount of determination.

The book describes up-to-date applications and relevant theoretical results. These applications come from various places, but the most important one, numerically speaking, is the internet based educational system ALEKS. The ALEKS system is bilingual English-Spanish and covers all of mathematics, from third grade to the end of high school, and chemistry. It is also widely used in higher education because US students are often poorly prepared when they reach the university level. The chapter by Taagepera and Arasasingham deals with the application of knowledge spaces, independent of ALEKS, to the teaching of college chemistry. The four chapters by Albert and his collaborators strive to give cognitive interpretations to the combinatoric structures obtained and used by the ALEKS system. The contribution by Eppstein is technical and develops means of searching the knowledge structure efficiently.