November 09, 2004
Crosstalk Seminar - Thu., Nov 18, 2:00 p.m.
The Promise and Reality of Web-based Tutoring
Professor David E. Pritchard, MIT physics department
Thursday, November 18, 2004
2:00 p.m.
Room 4-231
Abstract
Textbooks, Lectures, and most educational uses of the web are like broadcast radio: a message is prepared and broadcast, one can find out how many people are listening, but knowing that the message has been received remains elusive. In my view the great promise of the web is two way learning: individual responses for the student, formative and summative assessment for the teacher, and data and guidance to help the author improve the material and the pedagogy. Web-based intelligent tutors offer interactive tutoring for individual students, such as pedagogically useful responses to their wrong answers and hints and simpler subproblems upon student request.
Our research shows that one such tutor (see www.mycybertutor.com) teaches about twice as much per unit time as hand-graded written homework. Feedback from the students can reveal specific student mistakes and misconceptions, provide rich data allowing authors to improve their content, and show class difficulties on each problem for Just In Time Teaching. Our research shows that assessing the process of solution can give a far more accurate profile of student skills than can testing, allowing targeted remediatioin. Splitting the class into two groups that work the same problem after one group has been given a tutorial allows us to measure and improve the amount of learning per unit time from the tutorial. We are currently investigating why some pedagogies transfer several times more knowledge per unit of student time than others.
Powerpoint slides of the presentation. (~4mb)
Hello,
I had a question I didn't have the chance to ask yesterday:
What is the technology behind the 'intelligence' of the tutor? How does it know an answer is correct or not and how does the system know when to send hints and which ones to send?
Thanks,
PS: this was a great talk!
Posted by: Daniel Jamous at November 19, 2004 05:34 PMDaniel,
myCyberTutor currently has two kinds of intelligence, both designed to respond to students' wrong answers:
1. preprogrammed responses and operations conditioned on the student's response - these comment on formatting errors like missing parentheses, if the student uses variables not required in the correct solution, or if the students makes a particular general type of error that has been previously identified. These are specifically checked for and reesponded to (e.g. if the answer would be correct if sin and cos were reversed, etc.)
2. responses entered by the author to commonly given wrong answers to that particular problem - the progam displays the most frequently given incorrect answers and the author decides what response future students who give a particular one of these will receive. Our pedagogy requires that these responses be designed to convince the student that their answer is incorrect. Sometimes we also suggest a route to remediate this error.
In addition, hints are available upon student request. Often these are dispalyed in a list by title, and the student can pick and choose which to open (each at a small penalty). Some of the hints are suggestions (e.g. how to do this problem, which equation to use...) but others are questions that require a response (and can have thier own list of responses to wrong answers).
Dave
