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.

In his model, requirements needs, it must be able to represent is done unintentionally; a problem for filling system knowledge solver attempting to solve a gaps also direct explanation generation what these needs are. Ram proposed problem simply stores a trace of its by guiding retrieval and revision representations that include processing without attention to its of explanations during case-based the desired knowledge (possibly partially future relevance. However, Ng's previously explanation construction (Leake specified) and the reason that mentioned studies show that 1992). In the context of analogical the knowledge is sought. Leake for a different class of task, learning mapping, Thagard pointed out that focused on the representation of the goals have a strong effect on the goals, semantic constraints, and syntactic knowledge required to resolve anomalies learning performance of human constraints all affect analogical (which depends on a vocabulary learners. A future question is to identify mapping (Holyoak and Thagard 1989) of anomaly characterization structures the limits of goal-driven processing and the retrieval of potential analogs to describe the information in human learners.