Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Mental models reflect people's knowledge about entities and systems around them. Therefore, knowing and understanding mental models can help in exploring cognitive issues in instruction including why a student takes a certain approach or applies a particular strategy to solve a problem, why a student makes mistakes, and why and how misconceptions are developed. Four different mental models of recursion, used for synthesizing solutions to recursive programming problems, have been identified through students' protocols. Each model has been characterized in a way consistent with the students' protocols. Various problem solving behaviours are rationalized in terms of the models. Suggestions are made as to how the mental models develop and evolve in the course of learning. W e also present a learning environment in which these mental models are reified and we show how mental models can be incorporated into an intelligent tutoring system.