Recommendations for Use of Adaptive Tutoring Systems in the Classroom and in Educational Research

Abstract

The current paper and presentation provide background on the different uses of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) in context of course instruction, discusses specific instructor considerations that are associated with their use, and ways to use ITSs for educational research. Instructor considerations include the time necessary to plan prior to constructing an ITS, the process of constructing ITS lessons for use by students, the method in which students will interact with the ITS, approaches to incorporating ITS use into classes, and the information that instructors would find useful to be output from the ITS. Specifically, the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT), an open-source, domain independent ITS framework will be discussed as an approach to creating adaptive tutoring content for classroom use. GIFT includes straightforward authoring tools for instructors and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). These authoring tools are powerful, do not require a background in computer science to use, and result in fully adaptive computer-based lessons. Additionally, GIFT provides the flexibility for instructors to bring their pre-generated and already existing instructional material to the system and use it to create ITS lessons. The authoring tools allow the instructor to determine the path of their lesson and the components that their students will experience (i.e. surveys, quizzes, lesson materials, videos). The paper includes details about the development of an instructor dashboard in GIFT, ways for an instructor to use GIFT for educational research, and a discussion of general output information from ITSs that would be relevant to instructors.