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Abstract

Abstract. The goal of the reported research is the development of a computational approach that could help a cognitive scientist to interactively represent a learner's mental models, and to automatically validate their coherence with respect to the available experimental data. In a reported case-study, the student's mental models are inferred from questionnaires and interviews collected during a sequence of teaching sessions. These putative cognitive models are based on a theory of knowledge representation, derived from psychological results and educational studies, which accounts for the evolution of the student's knowledge over a learning period. The learning system WHY, able to handle (causal) domain knowledge, shows how to model the answers and the causal explanations given by the learner.