Analytic Culture in the U.S. Intelligence Community (PDF) - CIA

INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY
• allow either the system or the student to ask open-ended questions and initiate
instructional, “mixed-initiative” dialogue as needed or desired;
• generate instructional material and interactions on demand instead of
requiring developers to foresee and store all the materials and interactions
needed to meet all possible eventualities.
Mixed-initiative dialogue requires a language for information retrieval,
tools to assist decisionmaking, and instruction that is shared by both the system
and the student/user. The system must have the capability (referred to as
“generative capability”) to devise, on demand, interactions with students that
do not rely on predicted and prestored formats. This capability involves more
than generating problems tailored to each student’s needs. It must also provide
the interactions and presentations that simulate one-on-one tutorial instruction,
including coaching, hints, and critiques of completed solutions.
Cost containment is one motivation for wanting to generate responses to all
possible student states and actions instead of attempting to anticipate and store
them. Another arises from basic research on human learning, memory, perception,
and cognition. As documented by Neisser among others, during the
1960s and 1970s, the emphasis in basic research on human behavior and on
the way in which it is understood shifted from the strict logical positivism of
behavioral psychology, which focused on directly observable actions, to consideration
of the internal, cognitive processes that were needed to explain
empirically observed behavioral phenomena and are assumed to mediate and
enable human learning. 35
The hallmark of this approach is the view that seeing, hearing, and remembering
are all acts of construction, making more or less use of the limited
stimulus information provided by our perceptual capabilities. Constructivist
approaches are the subject of much current and relevant discussion in instructional
research circles, but they are firmly grounded in the foundations of scientific
psychology. 36 For instance, in 1890, William James stated his General
Law of Perception: “Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our
senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part)
always comes out of our mind.” 37
In this sense, the generative capability sought by intelligent instructional
systems is not merely something nice to have. It is essential if we are to
34
J. R. Carbonell, “AI in CAI: An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Computer-Assisted Instruction”;
J. D. Fletcher & M. R. Rockway.
35
U. Neisser, Cognitive Psychology.
36
For example, T. M. Duffy, and D. H. Jonassen, Constructivism and the Technology of Instruction;
S. Tobias and L. T. Frase, “Educational psychology and training.”
37
William James, Principles of Psychology: Volume I.
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