Design and Evaluation of the SUMIT Intelligent Teaching Assistant for Arithmetic

Abstract

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 (ITA) 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, diagnose misconceptions, generate graded sequences of sums, and summarize or replay whole user sessions for each of the “four rules of number.” This article outlines the design philosophy and the system architecture of the SUMIT system, and it reports a range of empirical studies of the type, incidence, and diagnosis of “bugs” for each operation, together with a series of evaluation studies of the classroom effectiveness of the system. It is concluded that construction of ITAs may...