How Human Tutors Employ Analogy To Facilitate Understanding
Evelyn Lulis, Martha W. Evens, JOEL A. MICHAEL · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2004
A corpus consisting of eighty-one one-on-one tutoring sessions with first-year medical students carried on by two professors of physiology at Rush Medical College was analyzed for the use of analogies to facilitate understanding of the topics covered.Analogies were infrequently used, but had a positive effect on improving student comprehension of the topics tutored.The human tutor's goals, topics, discourse strategies, follow-up, and clarification in the presence of misunderstanding were analyzed with the long term goal of implementing analogies in an intelligent tutoring system.