Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.