An Approach to Developing Intelligent Tutors in Mathematics

Mathematics is highly structured and underpins most of science and engineering. For this reason it has proved a very suitable test domain for intelligent tutoring system (ITS) research with the result that probably more tutoring systems have been structured for the domain than for any othw. However, there still exists no consensus on any approach for the design of such systems. Consequently, existing ITSs in the domain suffer from a considerable number of shortcomings which render them ‘unintelligent’. This paper after rigorously examining the shortcomings of existing approaches, presents an alternative approach to constructing ITSs in mathematics which has been demonstrated to have improved on at least some of the shortcomings of existing approaches. It also provides a flavour of how this approach has been implemented in the FITS system.