Dealing With Temporal Holes in Instructional ITS’s

Instructional Design, the technique typically used to design Computer Based Education software, including Intelligent Tutoring Systems, relies on a set of correctness metrics called Instructional Integrity. Hereby, pedagogical curricula should describe, in unambiguous, predictable, and measurable terms, what the student must do to demonstrate an understanding of course material. Computer Tutor design is subject to formal proofs of causal relations between states of an Instructional Graph. A time interval is assumed to have elapsed upon each transition among these. It is assumed that knowledge must have been acquired at the end of each interval. This is clearly consistent with Instructivism, since knowledge is quantifiable and incrementally administered. In reality, learning will occur holistically in time. As a result, measuring and tutoring the learning process at the end of predetermined causal-time intervals results in Temporal Holes where important events might be taking place. We deal with these holes using Modal-Temporal Logic Specifications, and extensions to the MetaTEM Executable Temporal Logic language. We subscribe to a Constructivist-based Pedagogy, which means that evidence of learning is qualifiable, since it comes from within the student's cognitive states (including emotions), is unique to each human being, and cannot be predetermined or computed by software. We argue that such specifications require innovations in the Graphical User Interface and provide a prototype as a proposal. We conclude by showing examples of Temporal Learning by Discovery in an attempt to eliminate the temporal holes.