Intelligent tutoring system

About: Intelligent tutoring system is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3472 publications have been published within this topic receiving 58217 citations. The topic is also known as: ITS.

Automatic prediction of frustration

Abstract: Predicting when a person might be frustrated can provide an intelligent system with important information about when to initiate interaction. For example, an automated Learning Companion or Intelligent Tutoring System might use this information to intervene, providing support to the learner who is likely to otherwise quit, while leaving engaged learners free to discover things without interruption. This paper presents the first automated method that assesses, using multiple channels of affect-related information, whether a learner is about to click on a button saying ''I'm frustrated.'' The new method was tested on data gathered from 24 participants using an automated Learning Companion. Their indication of frustration was automatically predicted from the collected data with 79% accuracy (chance=58%). The new assessment method is based on Gaussian process classification and Bayesian inference. Its performance suggests that non-verbal channels carrying affective cues can help provide important information to a system for formulating a more intelligent response.

The Andes Physics Tutoring System: Lessons Learned

Abstract: The Andes system demonstrates that student learning can be significantly increased by upgrading only their homework problem-solving support. Although Andes is called an intelligent tutoring system, it actually replaces only the students' pencil and paper as they do problem-solving homework. Students do the same problems as before, study the same textbook, and attend the same lectures, labs and recitations. Five years of experimentation at the United States Naval Academy indicates that Andes significantly improves student learning. Andes' key feature appears to be the grain-size of interaction. Whereas most tutoring systems have students enter only the answer to a problem, Andes has students enter a whole derivation, which may consist of many steps, such as drawing vectors, drawing coordinate systems, defining variables and writing equations. Andes gives feedback after each step. When the student asks for help in the middle of problem-solving, Andes gives hints on what's wrong with an incorrect step or on what kind of step to do next. Thus, the grain size of Andes' interaction is a single step in solving the problem, whereas the grain size of a typical tutoring system's interaction is the answer to the problem. This report is a comprehensive description of Andes. It describes Andes' pedagogical principles and features, the system design and implementation, the evaluations of pedagogical effectiveness, and our plans for dissemination.

ELM-ART: An Intelligent Tutoring System on World Wide Web

Abstract: Making ITS available on the World Wide Web (WWW) is a way to integrate the flexibility and intelligence of ITS with world-wide availability of WWW applications This paper discusses the problems of developing WWW-available ITS and, in particular, the problem of porting existing ITS to a WWW platform We present the system ELM-ART which is a WWW-based ITS to support learning programming in Lisp ELM-ART demonstrates how several known ITS technologies can be implemented in WWW context

Exploring the Assistance Dilemma in Experiments with Cognitive Tutors

Abstract: Intelligent tutoring systems are highly interactive learning environments that have been shown to improve upon typical classroom instruction. Cognitive Tutors are a type of intelligent tutor based on cognitive psychology theory of problem solving and learning. Cognitive Tutors provide a rich problem-solving environment with tutorial guidance in the form of step-by-step feedback, specific messages in response to common errors, and on-demand instructional hints. They also select problems based on individual student performance. The learning benefits of these forms of interactivity are supported, to varying extents, by a growing number of results from experimental studies. As Cognitive Tutors have matured and are being applied in new subject-matter areas, they have been used as a research platform and, particularly, to explore interactive methods to support metacognition. We review experiments with Cognitive Tutors that have compared different forms of interactivity and we reinterpret their results as partial answers to the general question: How should learning environments balance information or assistance giving and withholding to achieve optimal student learning? How best to achieve this balance remains a fundamental open problem in instructional science. We call this problem the “assistance dilemma” and emphasize the need for further science to yield specific conditions and parameters that indicate when and to what extent to use information giving versus information withholding forms of interaction.

Combining Software Games with Education: Evaluation of its Educational Effectiveness

Abstract: Computer games are very popular among children and adolescents. In this respect, they could be exploited by educational software designers to render educational software more attractive and motivating. However, it remains to be explored what the educational scope of educational software games is. In this paper, we explore several issues concerning the educational effectiveness, appeal and scope of educational software games through an evaluation study of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that operates as a virtual reality educational game. The results of the evaluation show that educational virtual reality games can be very motivating while retaining or even improving the educational effects on students. Moreover, one important finding of the study was that the educational effectiveness of the game was particularly high for students who used to have poor performance in the domain taught prior to their learning experience with the game.