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Individualized instruction significantly improves students' pedagogical and motivational outcomes. The study described here sought to characterize tutorial behaviors that could lead to these benefits and to consider why these behaviors should be pedagogically useful. The experiment studied 16 undergraduate and graduate university students learning LISP programming with the assistance of a tutor. Tutoring sessions were audiotaped, allowing analysis of every verbal utterance during the sessions and identification of the conversational events that led to pedagogical success. This discourse analysis suggested that tutors were successful because they took a very active role in leading the problem solving by offering confirmatory feedback and additional guidance while students were on profitable paths and error feedback after mistakes. However, tutors carefully structured their feedback to allow students to perform as much of the work as possible while ensuring that problem solving stayed on track. These results suggested the types of strategies tutors employ to facilitate guided learning by doing. Instructions for coders and reliability coders and a table showing transitions between events are appended. (Contains 72 references.) (Author/ND)

External representations have a great impact on what and how students learn. One key manner in which environments can operate upon novices' knowledge is through helping them ground their problem solving in an understanding of the situation embodied by the problem. In this paper, students' difficulties in microeconomics problem solving were investigated, along with the ways traditional representations such as supply and demand graphs interfere with students' situational understanding. Fourteen gifted students in grades 7 through 9 were videotaped solving a few economics problems similar to those found in typical introductory economics courses. How they used the diagrams to help themselves construct an understanding of the situation was studied. It was found that students who experienced minor impasses relied on the notation to overcome them, even though that sometimes led the students into worse errors. In contrast, when the notation did not offer any support for the reasoning, students fell back on reasoning about the situation in the world and were often more successful. Based on these results, it is argued that not only must the initial problem solving in a domain be based on novices' understanding of the world, but also that the notation used for the problem solving must encourage students to use this understanding to guide planning and to overcome impasses throughout the problem solving. Eight figures illustrate study data. (Contains 27 references.) (Author/SLD)

Examined the effects of tutoring on college students' ability to learn a computer programming language in order to characterize effective tutor behaviors. Found that successful tutors took a very active role in leading problem-solving by offering confirmatory feedback and additional guidance while students were on profitable paths and error feedback after mistakes. (MDM)