A Learning Environment for Knowledge-Structuring in History

It is important for a student to structurize his/her acquired knowledge in order to understand it deeply. However, the student scarcely does such a task spontaneously. Therefore, it is necessary to explicitly help the student construct his/her knowledge structure. In this paper, we present a system which explicitly helps a student structurize his/her knowledge in history, which is the subject a student tends to learn by rote. In this system, we use two strategies to help a student "knowledge-structuring by visualization" and "knowledge-structuring by reasoning". The former enables the system to communicate with a student smoothly by using the visualization tool. The latter enables a student to memorize his/her knowledge steadily by acquiring it through his/her own reasoning. We have implemented the system on Sun SPARCstation10, and ten subjects learned history by this system. As a result, seven of them reported that this system contributed to understanding the knowledge in history deeply