The ASSISTment Builder: Towards an Analysis of Cost Effectiveness of ITS Creation

Intelligent Tutoring Systems, while effective at producing student learning [2,7], are notoriously costly to construct [1,9], and require PhD level experience in cognitive science and rule based programming. The literature suggests [1,9] that it takes at least 200 hours of work to build 1 hour on ITS content. We have been engaged in building tools to reduce the development time, by allowing authors with no programming experience to build "pseudo-tutors" [6]. Pseudo-tutors are ITS constructs that mimic cognitive tutors but are limited in that they only apply to a single problem. The ASSISTment Builder is a tool designed to rapidly create, test, and deploy a very simple type of pseudo-tutors called ASSISTments. These tutors provide a simplified cognitive model based upon a state graph designed for a specific problem. These tutors offer many of the features of rulebased tutors, but with shorter creation time. The system simplifies the process of tutor creation to allow users wi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: FLAIRS
• Authors: Neil T. Heffernan, Terrence E. Turner, Abraao L. N. Lourenco, Michael A. Macasek, Goss Nuzzo-Jones, Kenneth R. Koedinger
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, FLAIRS 2006, Mimic Cognitive Tutors, PhD Level Experience, Tutors