grassi@hpindda.HP.COM (Maurizio Grassi) (08/23/88)
My name is MAURIZIO GRASSI, I am a student at the Polytechnic of Milan in Italy. I am developing a thesis about a prototype of an ITS system. My main interest is about your methodology in knowledge acquisition. In the project I am involved, I have to explore this problem and try to create an implemented model of an interactive knowledge acquisition tool. I am working with two other students. They solved the problem of guiding the student in learning and how to recover from his errors, and implemented a prototype of ITS which teaches two topics: - English verbs, - semantic nets. I have to generalize this work we design together and implement a tool which creates the knowledge base for the system. I would really appreciate it if someone would send me some information about projects or interesting references which can help me to design my work. A report about the project follows. Greetings, THE "EDUCATION EXPERT ENVIRONMENT" This research analyzes models of knowledge handled to provide an intelligent computer aided instructor. The methodology we are developing tries to work out the principles of teaching/learning processes on which pedagogic tools need to be based. These principles were formalized by Burton and Brown in: " An investigation of computer coaching for informal learning activities " (see Sleemann and Brown, Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Academic Press 1982). From this basis we want to build a shell-system which is a global environment in instruction. Teaching subjects can be divided in structured and non-structured, i.e. knowledge can be achieved by students in an incremental step-by-step way or in an unstructured manner. Our work designs a tool which solves the problem of structures learning. The key points, that characterize the intelligent tutoring system we are modeling, are: - being able to answer a variety of user questions and explaining its arguments using a model of the application domain; - giving advice in order to proceed with a task; - selecting and ordering material and choosing the most appropriate teaching strategy; - having a student's model; - optimizing the learning process. With the project, called Education Expert Environment, we want to monitor on the one hand the teacher in producing the subject and on the other the student in using this material. In order to create a flexible tool, we divide the problem into three parts: - the development of a course planning unit in which to acquire the knowledge (IN DESIGN); - the project of an inference engine about student's move (DONE); - the study of a manager of student's learning modality (DONE); The knowledge is recorded in a genetic graph (see Goldstein, " The genetic graph: a representation for the evolution of procedural knowledge ", International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 1979) we organize in three levels easy to handle: - the "island-network" in which the limits of the argument are defined; - the "island-model" in which the contents of the subjects are referenced; - the "concept-model" which is the specific learning unit. - The DESIGN UNIT The teacher, using a knowledge acquisition tool, plans the course and describes the teaching process. The "concept-model" of a particular argument is developed. Each model, which plays the role of rule-based domain expert, is embedded in the "island-model", the brick of the "island-network" that defines the global courseware. - The TEACHING-LEARNING UNIT The student, using the teaching/learning environment, is guided through the "island-network", the learning contest, by an expert manager which adapts its advice and explanation to the background knowledge and experience of the user. - The INFERENCE MACHINE Each concept is a framework to test student's knowledge. An expert "teacher", in a differential way, debugs student's errors and builds a model of his learning activity. This model is used by an "orator" which defines the answers and examples to be proposed to increase the learner's knowledge. An "evaluator" judges the quality of each move to investigate the student's capability.