Chapter 3: A Theory of Teaching and its Applications

Research methods and perspectives from a range of disciplines including education, psychology, artificial intelligence, and economics provide a set of tools for modeling complex human decision-making in fields such as teaching. This paper describes the foundations of such research and the underpinnings of a model of teaching-in-context that explains, on a line by line basis, the decision making by teachers during hour-long classroom lessons. The existence of such models provides tools for examining and improving teaching, as well as the possibility that the decision making in other professions can be comparably modeled.