Senior Scientist, BBN Technologies, 1967 - 1982.

D., University of Michigan, 1970 (Cognitive Psychology) A., University of Michigan, 1961 (Communication Sciences) A., University of Michigan, 1959 (Accounting) In addition, Collins was among the first to advocate for and outline design-based research methodologies in education.Įducation and professional appointments In response to conventional practices that often ignore the influence of culture and activity, Collins and colleagues have developed and studied cognitive apprenticeship as an effective alternative educational practice.

Collins has gradually shifted towards the situated cognition view of knowledge being embedded in the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. Building upon his work on intelligent tutoring systems, he has conducted numerous projects investigating the use of technology in schools and developing educational technologies for assessing and improving student learning. In conjunction with this project he developed a formal computational theory of Socratic tutoring, derived from analyses of inquiry teaching dialogues.Īs a cognitive scientist and foundational member of the field of the learning sciences, Collins has influenced several strands of educational research and development. Subsequently, Collins developed WHY, an intelligent tutoring system that used the Socratic method for tutoring causal knowledge and reasoning. Importantly, Collins developed methods to embed lessons learned from such research into the SCHOLAR system, improving system usability and effectiveness.

In addition, Collins studied and developed a formal theory characterizing the variety of plausible inferences people use to ask questions about which their knowledge is incomplete. Collins' extensive research program pioneered discourse analysis methods to study the strategies human tutors use to adapt their teaching to learners. Knowledge in SCHOLAR was structured analogously to the then theorized organization of human semantic memory as to afford a variety of meaningful interactions with the system. With collaborator Jaime Carbonell, Collins produced the first documented example of an intelligent tutor system called SCHOLAR CAI (computer-assisted instruction). In artificial intelligence, Collins is recognized for work on intelligent tutoring systems and plausible reasoning.

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