Teaching structural knowledge in the control of dynamic systems : Direction of causality makes a difference

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Schoppek, Wolfgang:
Teaching structural knowledge in the control of dynamic systems : Direction of causality makes a difference.
In: Forbus, Kenneth ; Gentner, Dedre ; Regier, Terry (Hrg.): CogSci 2004 proceedings : proceedings of the twenty-sixth annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society. - Mahwah, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum , 2004 . - pp. 1219-1224
ISBN 0-8058-5464-9

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Recent publications about humans controlling dynamic systems have emphasized the role of specific rules or exemplar knowledge. Although it has been shown that small systems can be controlled with these types of knowledge, there is evidence that general knowledge about
the structure of a system plays an important role, too, particularly when dealing with systems of higher complexity. However, teaching structural knowledge has often failed the expected positive effect. The present work investigates details of acquisition and use of structural
knowledge. It is hypothesized that guiding subjects to focus on dependencies rather than effects supports them in applying structural knowledge, especially when the application is practiced in a strategy training. An experiment with N=95 subjects supported the hypothesis of
the usefulness of the dependency perspective, but revealed an adverse effect of the strategy training. Differences between subgroups studying different majors have been found that give rise to questions about the relation between prior knowledge and instruction. The results have
interesting implications for models of how structural knowledge is represented as well as for methods of teaching system control efficiently.