Knowledge based mechanisms for tutoring systems in science and engineering

C. W. Liew, Joel A. Shapiro, D. E. Smith

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In science and engineering courses, students are often presented a situation for which they are asked to identify the relevant principles and to instantiate them as a set of equations. For an ITS to determine the correctness and relevance of the student's answer and generate effective feedback, it must map the student variables and equations onto the physical properties and concepts that are relevant to the situation. The space of possible mappings of variables and equations is extremely large. Domain independent techniques by themselves are unable to overcome the complexity hurdles. This paper describes how an ITS can use constraint propagation and algebraic techniques combined with domain and problem-specific knowledge to solve the mapping problem with systems of algebraic equations. The techniques described in this paper have been implemented in the PHYSICS TUTOR tutoring system and evaluated on three data sets that contain submissions from students in several introductory Physics courses.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings 19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI 2007
Pages95-102
Number of pages8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Event19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI 2007 - Patras, Greece
Duration: Oct 29 2007Oct 31 2007

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI
Volume2
ISSN (Print)1082-3409

Other

Other19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence, ICTAI 2007
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityPatras
Period10/29/0710/31/07

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Engineering(all)

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