Research Methods Tutoring in the Classroom

AutoTutor is very different from previous intelligent tutoring systems. It interacts with students using free-form natural language dialog as human tutors do. It uses approximate natural language understanding techniques to compare student answers to a set of expected responses. Evaluations of AutoTutor have shown that it can be effective in increasing student learning for multiple domains. In this paper, we present RMT (Research Methods Tutor) which is a direct descendant of AutoTutor. Research methods is a richer conceptual domain than some of the others in which AutoTutor has been used. We describe the types of topics which RMT will use, the differences in pedagogical strategies which it will include, and how it will be integrated into a research methods course at DePaul University.