[1] Cognitive Tutors can be implemented into classrooms as a part of blended learning that combines textbook and software activities.
A 2013 report concluded that Carnegie Learning Curricula and Cognitive Tutor was found to have mixed effects on mathematics achievement for high school students.
[7] The interface component reflects the decisions made by the tutoring model in different forms such as Socratic dialogs, feedback and hints.
A cognitive model is an expert system that generates a multitude of solutions to the problems presented to students.
[9] Cognitive Tutors provide step-by-step guidance as a learner develops a complex problem-solving skill through practice.
[10] Typically, cognitive tutors provide such forms of support as: (a) a problem-solving environment that is designed rich and "thinking visible"; (b) step-by-step feedback on student performance; (c) feedback messages specific to errors; (d) context-specific next-step hints at student's request, and (e) individualized problem selection.
ACT-R, a member of the ACT family, is the most recent cognitive architecture, devoted primarily to modelling human behavior.
The architecture functions by matching productions on perceptions and facts, mediated by the real-valued activation levels of objects, and executing them to affect the environment or alter declarative memory.
ACT-R has been used to model psychological aspects such as memory, attention, reasoning, problem solving, and language processing.
Their aim was to "...develop systems that provide individualized assistance to students as they work on challenging real-world problems in complex domains such as computer programming, algebra and geometry".
According to a Business Insider Report article, Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, describes how teachers can integrate cognitive tutoring software into the classroom.
Despite many years of trials, improvements, and a potential to advance learning objectives, the creators continue to rely primarily on outside sources for curricular direction.
Despite the time invested, the challenges associated with meeting the needs of the learner within the constraints of the design often result in compromises in flexibility and cognitive fidelity.
[19] In addition, it is possible that learners will use the system of prompts and hints to access the answers prematurely thereby advancing through the exercises which may result in them not meeting the learning objectives.