Anurag.Acharya@CENTRO.SOAR.CS.CMU.EDU (05/05/88)
Date: May 11, 1988
Time: 3:00pm
Place: Wean 5409
Who: Blake D. Ward
Title: A Soar-Based Tutor for Electrostatics
ABSTRACT
Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are computer-based instructional
systems that attempt to exhibit some of the intelligent capabilities of
human tutors. In addition to being important for obvious educational
reasons, they are also a valuable testbed for theories of cognition and
represent a difficult real-world task for artificial intelligence research
in general. Theories of cognition and learning are important to the
development of effective tutoring systems, but all but a few tutoring
systems are not based on any underlying cognitive theory. Within high
school and post-secondary education, science is an important field and this
is reflected by a fairly large body of research concerning the differences
between novice and expert scientific problem solvers. However, with very
few exceptions, most of that research has yet to be applied to science
education in a substantial way. The research proposed here will explore the
implications of using the Soar architecture (which is both a theory of
general cognition and a powerful AI problem solver) to develop an
intelligent tutoring system framework. To focus and evaluate this effort,
an electrostatics tutor (ET-Soar) will be developed, making use of recent
novice/expert scientific problem solving research with an emphasis on
getting students to adopt the internal representations used by expert
problem solvers.
A copy of the proposal will be left in the CS lounge.
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