Teaching an Agent to Test Students

This paper presents an innovative application of the Disciple Learning Agent Shell to the building of an educational agent that generates history tests for middle school students, to assist in the assessment of their understanding and use of higher-order thinking skills. Disciple has been taught by an educator to generate and answer basic test questions and to explain the answers. From its interaction with the educational expert, Disciple has learned general rules that allow it to generate a large number of new test questions for students, together with hints, answers, and explanations of the answers. As a result, it can guide the students during their practice of higher-order thinking skills as they would be directly guided by the educator. It can also be used by the educator to generate a different exam for each student in the class. Disciple has been experimentally evaluated by history experts, students and tea-chers, with very promising results. The work on developing this educational agent illustrates an integration of machine learning, knowledge acquisition, problem solving and intelligent tu-toring systems in the context of computer-based assessment involving multimedia documents.