Beyond the Short Answer Question with Research Methods Tutor

Research Methods Tutor is a new intelligent tutoring system created by porting the existing implementation of the AutoTutor system to a new domain, Research Methods in Behavioural Sciences, which allows more interactive dialogues. The procedure of porting allowed for an evaluation of the domain independence of the AutoTutor framework and for the identification of domain related requirements. Specific recommendations for the development of other dialogue-based tutors were derived from our experience. 1 Motivations for a New Tutor Recent advances in Intelligent Tutoring System technology focus on developing dialogue-based tutors, which act as conversational partners in learning. AutoTutor [5, 7], one of the prevalent systems in this field, claims to simulate naturalistic tutoring sessions in the domain of computer literacy. An innovative characteristic of AutoTutor is the use of a talking head as the primary interface with the user. The system is also claimed to be domain independent and to be capable of supporting deep reasoning in the tutorial dialogue. One goal of the current project is to test these claims. Another motivation was the fact that the domain of AutoTutor, computer literacy, provides limited potential for activating deep reasoning mechanisms. By porting the tutor to a new domain, which requires in-depth qualitative reasoning, we can address issues of domain independence and framework usability in a concrete manner. The new tutor, based on the AutoTutor framework, is built on the domain of Research Methods in Behavioural Sciences and thus was named Research Methods