Facilitating The Design Of Diagnostic Learning Modules With Cape

Diagnostic learning modules adapt themselves in response to common difficulties experienced by students attempting problem-solving tasks. The nature of these adaptations concerns providing focused remediation and adjusting the flow of follow-on activities. An authoring environment that supports the design of such modules also provides facilities for capturing recurring structural and procedural idioms as instructional design patterns, with the aim of reducing the number of unique decisions to be addressed when creating similar modules. We report an application of this strategy that involves creating a general design pattern for numerical problem-solving tasks. New modules can be derived from this pattern by specifying details of an instance as data structures, thereby limiting what needs to be known about the design environment and its representation by novice designers. Our motivation is to expand the creation and use by faculty of these scaffolding designs by reducing the effort required to effectively employ the supporting technologies.