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Personal Assistant for Learning

PALs: Simple cognitively-based computer tutorials for teaching scientific thinking skills

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Design principles

Instructional efficacy

Possible uses of PALs

PALs, computer tutorials acting as "Personal Assistants for Learning", are designed to provide students with individual guidance and feedback helping them to learn important thinking skills. Without relying on artificial-intelligence techniques, PALs aim to achieve their efficacy by careful cognitive analyses and effective instructional strategies.

PALs have been constructed (a) to teach students how to interpret and apply some important scientific concepts and principles (such as acceleration and Newton's mechanics laws) and (b) to teach qualitative reasoning skills. These PALs help students learn more systematic ways of thinking by using a reciprocal-teaching strategy (whereby students and computers coach each other) and an explicit visual representation of qualitative reasoning processes.

A controlled experimental study in an actual physics course showed that the PAL tutorials were nearly as effective as individual human tutoring and that they were well liked by the students.

Learn more about the PALs

Run PALs on the web

PALs were produced under the direction of Professor Frederick Reif with partial support from the National Science Foundation.

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation