given levels of mastery on a set of knowledge components, predict the performance on a new problem (Singley & Anderson, 1989).
For instance, suppose a student has mastered 15 of the 20 knowledge components required to do a task.
This predicts the student’s behavior on the task—where the student will ask for help, how long it will take to do the task, which errors occur, etc
However, these predictions can be inaccurate if the assumed knowledge components are not accurate reflections of how the student actually understands the task domain