UMass Lowell
Computer Science Colloquium 
Announcement
 
 
Speaker: Dr. Neil Heffernan 
 Dept of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Date: December 7, 2001 
Time: 3:00pm--4:00pm
Place: Olsen 311 (The Media Lab)
 Refreshments are served at 2:30pm



 
  
 
 
  
  
 


 

Intelligent Tutoring Systems have Forgotten the Tutor

Intelligent Tutoring Systems have been built that lead to enhanced student learning.  The architecture that has proven the most successful is the  Andersonian model-tracing architecture.  In this talk, I will present an introduction to model-tracing tutors, as well as a new architecture that has been developed to expand upon the traditional framework.  I will also describe the cognitive science research that was needed to build our cognitive model of student behavior.  This model is novel because contrary to prior work that has emphasized the difficulties of using variables, as well as the difficulties of comprehending the text of a word problem, I establish the empirical result that articulating a complete expression (e.g., 800-40*3) is a major determinant of problem difficulty.  I will also describe the research that went into building our model of the pedagogical behavior of an experienced human tutor.  These two models are combined to make a new intelligent tutoring system called "Ms. Lindquist", which is undergoing evaluation.  Ms. Lindquist has been used by over a thousand students at www.AlgebraTutor.org.

Colloquium Coordinator: Jie Wang, wang@cs.uml.edu

Website: http://www.cs.uml.edu/~wang/colloquia/