Goal-Driven Learning: Fundamental Issues: A Symposium Report

In AI, psychology, and education, a growing body of research supports the view that learning is a goal-directed process. Psychological experiments show that people with varying goals process information differently, studies in education show that goals have a strong effect on what students learn, and functional arguments in machine learning support the necessity of goal-based focusing of learner effort. At the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, a symposium brought together researchers in AI, psychology, and education to discuss goal-driven learning. This article presents the fundamental points illuminated at the symposium, placing them in the context of open questions and current research directions in goal-driven learning.