About

People

Sponsors

About:

We have built a new ITS, called "Ms. Lindquist", that not only can model-trace the student's actions, but can be more human-like in carrying on a running conversation, complete with probing questions, worked examples, positive and negative feedback, follow-up questions in embedded sub-dialogs, and requests for explanation as to why something is correct. In order to build Miss Lindquist we have expanded the model-tracing paradigm; not only does she have a model of the student but also has a model of tutorial reasoning (e.g. Clancey, 1982) for our specific domain. Ms. Lindquist has multiple different tutorial strategies. Preliminary testing with 20 students showed that Ms. Lindquist is was better then the traditional CAI approach when the number of problems is controlled for. Ms. Lindquist is freely available on the web at the algebratutor.org web-site.

This project is affiliated with CIRCLE: an NSF center for the study of tutoring.

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People:

• Neil Heffernan, Carnegie Mellon University, Graduate Student.
• Ken Koedinger Carnegie Mellon University, Professor.

Publications:

• Heffernan, N. T., & Koedinger, K. R. (Accepted at the Intelligent Tutoring Systems 2000 Conference Workshop entitled "Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference's Workshop in Algebra Leaning"). Building a 3rd generation ITS for symbolization: Adding a Tutorial Model with Multiple Tutorial Strategies. .ps (11 pages)
• Heffernan, N. T., & Koedinger, K. R. (Accepted to the AAAI Fall Symposium on Building Dialgoue Systems for Tutorial Applications). Intelligent Tutoring Systems are Missing the Tutor: Building a More Strategic Dialog-Based Tutor . .doc (5 pages)

Sponsors:

• The Spencer Foundation
• The National Science Foundation through a grant to the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Constructive Learning Environments (CIRCLE) at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.

For problems or questions regarding this web contact [Neil Heffernan].
Comments and suggestions regarding these web pages are also welcome.