Uso de conhecimento de senso comum na educação para geração de analogias e similaridades
Resumen
The use of analogies is a cognitive strategy frequently adopted by learners when they
want to understand some new concept. In that case, the analogy connects the new concept
with the previous knowledge, attaching it in the learner cognitive structure. Some studies
points out the use of analogies and previous knowledge of learners increases the learning
material quality, stimulating the learners to use their cognitive strategies. Nevertheless, there
are no studies about a way to enable both the use of analogies and learners previous
knowledge to facilitate continued learning, mainly taking into account computational support
for e-leaning. In this work it is presented a prototype of an on-line assistant to support a
training course about workspace safety issues. The application uses a common sense
reasoning engine and the Brazilian Open Mind common sense knowledge base, to make
inferences about concepts that might be unfamiliar to the students. It is explored the use of
analogies to explain topics, enhancing learning by using context capture to help students
associate related topics. It is believed that common sense can be used to take into account
cultural considerations while helping learners to build analogies. It is also explored the
suggestion of analogies, which were build using commonsense knowledge, to the teachers
during the project of instructional material design. Preliminary results with students using the
assistant point that they considered analogies useful in the learning process, that the system is
helpful in understanding new concepts, and that it helps connect the information searched for
with common sense knowledge.