Design and evaluation of the SUMIT intelligent teaching assistant for arithmetic

Abstract

The technique for creating diagnostic tutors for arithmetic has been established for over a decade, but progress towards the creation of an educationally viable system has been disappointingly slow. The SUMIT intelligent teaching assistant for arithmetic was designed explicitly to meet the requirements of classroom arithmetic teaching. Unlike earlier arithmetic tutors, SUMIT is intended to function as a teacher's assistant, rather than a surrogate teacher. It is fully interactive and is able to give adaptive help; to diagnose misconceptions; to generate graded sequences of sums; and to summarise or replay whole user sessions for each of the ‘four rules of number’. This paper outlines the design philosophy and the system architecture of the SUMIT system, and it reports two evaluation studies of the classroom effectiveness of the system, demonstrating excellent learning via the use of SUMIT, and a further advantage of the availability of the diagnostic help. It is concluded that construction of intelligent teaching assistants may provide cost-effective and valuable educational resources.