Individual Differences in Proof Structures Following Multimodal Logic Teaching
Jon Oberlander, Richard Cox, Padraic Monaghan, Keith Stenning, Richard Francis Tobin · 1996
We have been studying how students respond to multimodal logic teaching with Hyperproof. Performance measures have already indicated that students' pre-existing cognitive styles have a significant impact on teaching outcome. Furthermore, a substantial corpus of proofs has been gathered via automatic logging of proof development. We report results from analyses of final proof structure, exploiting (i) `proofograms', a novel method of proof visualisation, and (ii) corpus-linguistic bigram analysis of rule use. Results suggest that students' cognitive styles do indeed influence the structure of their logical discourse, and that the effect may be attributable to the relative skill with which students manipulate graphical abstractions. Introduction: multimodal logical discourse Computer-based multimodal tools are giving people the freedom to express themselves in brand new ways. But what do people actually do when given these tools? Does everyone end up generating the same form...