CIRCSlM-Tutor version 2, a dialogne-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS), is nearly five years old. It conducts a conversation with a student to help the student learn to solve a class of problems in cardiovascular physiology dealing with the regulation of blood pressure. It uses natural language for both input and output, and can handle a variety of syntactic constructions and lexical items...

We present a method to simultaneously search for student-level variables constructed from Cognitive Tutor log data and graphical causal models. We seek causal explanations of behavior in Cognitive Tutors, including “gaming the system” and off-task behavior, selecting variables by their contribution to causal structure and strength learning.

Turn planning is not well-studied in natural language dialogue systems. The current version of CIRCSIM-Tutor attempts to imitate human tutorial dialogue. It generates comprehensible conversation but sounds unnatural. We propose to add a turn planner to improve intra-tum coherence by overall planning of variable references, discourse markers, acknowledgments and softeners. This paper specifies t...

In this paper we consider two questions related to student modeling in an intelligent tutoring system: 1) What kind of student model should we build when we design a new system; 2) Should we divide the student model into different components depending on the information involved. We consider these two questions in the context of a conversational intelligent tutoring system, CIRCSIM-Tutor. We fi...

Background in music theory. Although classical musicians are expected to master the principles of tonal counterpoint, they find them notoriously difficult to learn. In part, these difficulties arise because traditional counterpoint tutors have two shortcomings. First, most tutors give students elaborate lists of rules, but they do not give advice on how students should organize those rules in s...

The Unification Tutor is experimental Intelligent Tutoring System for the domain of the unification of Prolog terms. It demonstrates the interactive use of Feature-Based Modelling an approach to cognitive modelling that has been presented at previous ASCILITE Conferences (Webb, 1988b.) The Unification Tutor has been used by Third Year Computer Science students at La Trobe University during Sept...

A new intelligent tutoring system is presented for the domain of solving equations. This system is novel, because it is an intelligent equation-solving tutor that combines a cognitive model of the domain with a model of dialog-based tutoring. The tutorial model is based on the observation of an experienced human tutor and captures tutorial strategies specific to the domain of equation-solving. ...

In examine the tutoring protocols of one expert human tutor tutoring 10 students in solving physics problems, four analyses reveal that he tutored the five good learners in different ways than the five poorer learners, resulting also in greater adjusted gains for the good learners. This opens up the question of whether the tutor is non-optimally adaptive. We introduce a new conceptual framework...

The CIRCSIM-Tutor version 3 input understander is the module which will process student answers during a tutoring dialogue. We have transcripts of human tutors conducting such dialogues, as well as logs of students using earlier versions of the computer tutor. This paper addresses how the input understander handles some of the language phenomena we have observed. Even when the student is giving...