From the Process of Instruction to the Process of Learning: Constructivist Implications for the Design of Intelligent Learning Environments

A central issue of intelligent systems that support learning is the adaptation of the learning experiences to the individual needs of the learner. This general issue can be specialised into various different ways of promoting this adaptation according to different educational philosophies. The instructional way is based on planning a sequence of instructional steps based on a previously defined structure of domain knowledge and on an evaluation of the domain knowledge acquired by the learner. In this paper we discuss a constructivist way of promoting this adaptation and its implications for the design of systems to support learning. The implications we identified affect four aspects of the design of these systems: the way the domain is modelled, the way the sequence of learning experiences is determined, the way learning is evaluated, and the role played by the system. After discussing the conceptual differences between the instructional and constructivist approaches in the context of these four aspects, we derive the design implications correspondent to each aspect and present some formal mechanisms that we have developed to support their implementation. The application of these mechanisms is illustrated with examples taken from a simple learning environment that we have developed.