Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Publisher Summary The goal of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) would be to engage the students in sustained reasoning activity and to interact with the student based on a deep understanding of the students' behavior. This chapter begins by providing an overview of intelligent tutoring systems. The chapter comments on competing research goals in the field, followed by descriptions of two successful systems: (1) the Pittsburgh urban math project algebra tutor project and (2) the SHERLOCK project. These two systems are being deployed in real-world educational environments with substantial success. This chapter briefly describes the underlying theory and implementation of each system, to motivate later discussions. A description of the standard components in an intelligent tutoring system is also presented along with a discussion of human-computer interaction assessment issues unique to educational software. This chapter also provides a prescription for ITS design and development methods. Several issues concerning ITS design principles are also addressed in the chapter.