Although it is well documented that one-to-one tutoring is more effective than alternative training methods, there have been few attempts to examine the process of naturalistic tutoring. This project explored dialogue patterns in 44 tutoring sessions in which graduate students tutored undergraduate students on troublesome topics in research methods. W e analyzed pedagogical strategies, feedback mechanisms, question asking, question answering, and pragmatic assumptions during the tutoring process.

Educational software would benefit from question asking facilities that are theoretically grounded in psychology, education, and artificial intelligence. Our previous research has investigated the psychological mechanisms of question asking and has developed a computationally tractable model of human question answering. We have recently developed a Point and Query (P&Q) human-computer interface based on this research. With the P & Q software, the student asks a question by simply pointing to a word or picture element and then to a question chosen from a menu of "good" questions associated with the element. This study examined students' question asking over time, using the P & Q software, while learning about woodwind instruments. While learning, the students were expected to solve tasks that required either deep-level causal knowledge or superficial knowledge. The frequency of questions asked with the P & Q interface was approximately 800 limes the number of questions asked per student per hour in a classroom. The learning goals directly affected the ordering of questions over time. For example, students did not ask deep-level causal questions unless that knowledge was necessary to achieve the learning goal.

We conducted an experimental test of the Graesser and Clark (1985) model of question-answering for why questions.This model specifies how individuals answer different types of questions by searching through various sources of information after comprehending a text. The sources of information include the passage structure and the generic knowledge structures which are associated with the content words in the query.After these knowledge structures are activated in working memory, search components narrow down a set of relevant answers. A subset of these components were tested in this experiment: (1) an arc search procedure specifying which nodes and arcs within an information source are sampled for answers to a why-question; (2)arc distance, the number of arcs in the representational network that connect the queried node to the answer node; and (3) the intersection of information between the passage structure and the generic knowledge structures associated with the query.After reading short stories, subjects were presented with questions and a number of theoretical answers to each question. Subjects were timed as they judged whether each answer was "Good" (appropriate and relevant) or "Bad" (inappropriate or irrelevant). Results supported the validity of the arc search procedure in that subjects robustly distinguished theoretically good answers from theoretically bad answers to specific questions.

We investigated how college students answer questions about the content of illustrated expository text. Subjects studied illustrated texts describing causal event chains that unfold during the operation of everyday machines. Subjects subsequently provided written answers to questions about events occurring in each machine. Four types of questions were asked: why did event X occur?. how did X occur?, what are the consequences pf X occurring?, and what if X didn't occur?. In our analysis of the answer protocols, we adopted the theoretical framework of the QUES T model of human question answering (Graesser & Franklin, 1990). The present study supported predictions generated from three components of the QUEST model: question categorization, utilization of information sources, and convergence principles. Our results also revealed two novel findings. First, subjects had a bias toward sampling information from the text more than from the picture. Second, subjects tended to sample infontiation depicted in both the text and the picture.