A Guiding Vision for Fluid Learning: The Future of Education and Training

Position paper by the Digital Media Collaboratory (DMC) of the IC² Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. The authors envision learning systems as a ubiquitous public utility and propose an architecture to accomplish it. The paper includes a description of DMC research activities in 2003.IC2 Institut

Developing an Affordable Authoring Tool For Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) are computer based tutoring systems that provide individualized tutoring to the students. Building an ITS is recognized to be expensive task in terms of cost and resources. Authoring tools provide a framework and an environment for building the ITSs that help to reduce the resources like skills, time and cost required to build an intelligent tutoring system. In this thesis we have implemented the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) and performed experiments to empirically determine the common programming errors that authors tend to make while building an ITS and study what is hard in authoring an ITS. The CTAT were used in a graduate class at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and also at the 4th Summer school organized at the Carnegie Mellon University. Based on the analysis of the experiments we suggest future work to reduce the debugging time and thereby reduce the time required to author an ITS. We also implemented the model tracing algorithm in JESS, evaluated its performance and compared to that of the model tracing algorithm in TDK. This research is funded by the Office of Naval Research (Grant # N00014-0301-0221)

Expert-Generated and Auto-Generated Socratic Tutoring Systems For Code Comprehension

Programming skills are a vital part of many disciplines but can be challenging to teach and learn. Thus, the programming courses are considered difficult and a major stumbling block. To overcome these challenges, students could benefit from extensive individual support such as tutoring, but there are simply not enough qualified tutors available to meet rising demands.A potential solution is the development of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), which offer individualized, one-on-one instruction. Such systems can offer the support to make programming instruction more effective, scalable and reduce existing teachers\u27 workloads.This dissertation demonstrates how conversational ITSs and the Socratic method of teaching can improve a novice\u27s understanding of programming concepts and, in particular, the scaffolding of code comprehension processes. Furthermore, this work provides a novel method to automatically author a Socratic dialogue-based ITS. Indeed, two major outcomes of this work are a Socratic dialogue-based ITS and an automated dialogue authoring tool, which generates full Socratic dialogue from Java source code.The key objectives of this dissertation were, first, to determine whether the Socratic method would be effective at eliciting learners to engage in self-explanations with the help of the Socratic Tutor ITS and, second, to assess the quality of Socratic Author\u27s auto-generated tutorial dialogue. Thus, the work presented here sought to answer two main research questions: (1) can a Socratic ITS lead to improved code comprehension? and (2) to what extent can Socratic dialogue be generated automatically?In sum, this research helps establish a relationship between code comprehension and the use of the Socratic method in learning computer programming. Furthermore, the work introduces a novel approach for generating Socratic dialogue from source code with examples for the Java programming language. The auto-authoring tool could help teachers and ITS developers create tutorial dialogues automatically from Java code without requiring nondomain knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, no such auto-generation of tutorial dialogues from source code has been done before and thus constituting a premiere

Using ConceptGrid as an easy authoring technique to check natural language responses

ConceptGrid provides a template-style approach to check natural language responses by students using a model-tracing style intelligent tutoring system. The tutor-author creates, using a web-based authoring system, a latticestyle structure that contains the set of required concepts that need to be in a student response. The author can also create just-in-time feedback based on the concepts present or absent in the student\u27s response. ConceptGrid is integrated within the xPST authoring tool and was tested in two experiments, both of which show the efficacy of the technique to check student answers. The first study tested the tutor\u27s effectiveness overall in the domain of statistics. The second study investigated ConceptGrid\u27s use by non-programmers and non-cognitive scientists. ConceptGrid extends existing capabilities for authoring of intelligent tutors by using this template-based approach for checking sentence-length natural language input

Building Intelligent Tutoring Systems

This project\u27s goal was to improve the ASSISTments intelligent tutoring system\u27s algebraic capabilities. We worked towards three main objectives. First, we built support for parsing expressions and comparing them for algebraic equality. Second, we implemented an interactive grapher capable of plotting a variety of expressions. Third, we added support for rendering expressions to well formatted images. Finally, we implemented a basic tutoring system including sample problems that demonstrate our work, establishing our tools\u27 usability and integrability

Facilitating teacher participation in intelligent computer tutor design : tools and design methods.

This work addresses the widening gap between research in intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) and practical use of this technology by the educational community. In order to ensure that ITSs are effective, teachers must be involved in their design and evaluation. We have followed a user participatory design process to build a set of ITS knowledge acquisition tools that facilitate rapid prototyping and testing of curriculum, and are tailored for usability by teachers. The system (called KAFITS) also serves as a test-bed for experimentation with multiple tutoring strategies. The design includes novel methodologies for tutoring strategy representation (Parameterized Action Networks) and overlay student modeling (a layered student model), and incorporates considerations from instructional design theory. It also allows for considerable student control over the content and style of the information presented. Highly interactive graphics-based tools were built to facilitate design, inspection, and modification of curriculum and tutoring strategies, and to monitor the progress of the tutoring session. Evaluation of the system includes a sixteen-month case study of three educators (one being the domain expert) using the system to build a tutor for statics (forty topics representing about four hours of on-line instruction), testing the tutor on a dozen students, and using test results to iteratively improve the tutor. Detailed throughput analysis indicates that the amount of effort to build the statics tutor was, surprisingly, comparable to similar figures for building (non-intelligent) conventional computer aided instructional systems. Few ITS projects focus on educator participation and this work is the first to empirically study knowledge acquisition for ITSs. Results of the study also include: a recommended design process for building ITSs with educator participation; guidelines for training educators; recommendations for conducting knowledge acquisition sessions; and design tradeoffs for knowledge representation architectures and knowledge acquisition interfaces

Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research

Students´ language in computer-assisted tutoring of mathematical proofs

Truth and proof are central to mathematics. Proving (or disproving) seemingly simple statements often turns out to be one of the hardest mathematical tasks. Yet, doing proofs is rarely taught in the classroom. Studies on cognitive difficulties in learning to do proofs have shown that pupils and students not only often do not understand or cannot apply basic formal reasoning techniques and do not know how to use formal mathematical language, but, at a far more fundamental level, they also do not understand what it means to prove a statement or even do not see the purpose of proof at all. Since insight into the importance of proof and doing proofs as such cannot be learnt other than by practice, learning support through individualised tutoring is in demand. This volume presents a part of an interdisciplinary project, set at the intersection of pedagogical science, artificial intelligence, and (computational) linguistics, which investigated issues involved in provisioning computer-based tutoring of mathematical proofs through dialogue in natural language. The ultimate goal in this context, addressing the above-mentioned need for learning support, is to build intelligent automated tutoring systems for mathematical proofs. The research presented here has been focused on the language that students use while interacting with such a system: its linguistic propeties and computational modelling. Contribution is made at three levels: first, an analysis of language phenomena found in students´ input to a (simulated) proof tutoring system is conducted and the variety of students´ verbalisations is quantitatively assessed, second, a general computational processing strategy for informal mathematical language and methods of modelling prominent language phenomena are proposed, and third, the prospects for natural language as an input modality for proof tutoring systems is evaluated based on collected corpora