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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson, J. R., Boyle, C. F., Corbett, A.T. and Lewis, M.W. (1990). Cognitive Modeling and Intelligent Tutoring. Artificial Intelligence, 42, 7–49.
Anderson, J. R., Boyle, C. F. and Reiser, B. J. (1985). Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Science, 228, 456–462.
Brown, J. S. and Burton, R. R. (1978). Diagnostic models for procedural bugs in basic mathematical skills. Cognitive Science, 2, 155–192.
Brown, J. S. and VanLehn, K. (1980). Repair Theory: A generative theory of bugs in procedural skills. Cognitive Science, 4, 379–426.
Hartley, J.R. and Sleeman, D.H. (1973). Towards intelligent teaching systems. Int. J. Man-Machine Studies, 5, 215–236.
Nicolson, R. I. (1991). Design and Evaluation of the SUMIT Intelligent Teaching Assistant for Arithmetic. Interactive Learning Environments, 1, 265–287.
Nicolson, R. I. and Nicolson, M. K. (1986). A case study of use of the SUMS program. In M Hope (ed). Computers and Special Education. London, Council for Educational Technology.
Nicolson, R. I. and Nicolson, M.K. (1984). SUMS — interactive middle school arithmetic. Program suite. London, Council for Educational Technology.
Nicolson, R. I., Bowen, P. and Nicolson, M. K. (1984). Classroom evaluation of the SUMS CAL arithmetic program. Human Learning, 3, 129–136.
Nicolson, R. I. and Darling, E. (submitted). Group versus individual instruction using a computer-based arithmetic tutoring program.
Nicolson, R. I. and Harrop, C. (in preparation). Diagnosis does help in intelligent tutoring.
Ruthven, K. (1985). The AI dimension? In D J Smith (ed) IT and education: signposts and Bloom B.S. (1984). The two sigma effect: the search for methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring. Educational Researcher, 13, 3–16.
Sleeman, D., Kelly, A.E., Martinak, R., Ward, R.D. & Moore J.L. (1989). Studies of diagnosis and remediation with high school algebra students. Cognitive Science, 13, 551–568.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Nicolson, R.I. (1992). Design and evaluation of the SUMIT intelligent teaching assistant for arithmetic. In: Tomek, I. (eds) Computer Assisted Learning. ICCAL 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 602. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55578-1_94
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-55578-1_94
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-55578-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47221-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive