CIRCLE seminars: a new CMU-LRDC seminar series on tutoring and related topics

[Peter Brusilovsky]

A new seminar series has begun, and you may want to subscribe to the
distribution list in order to recieve announcements.  The seminar series is
sponsored by CIRCLE and involves talks on tutoring and related topics.

The first speaker was Ray Mooney from the University of Texas, who spoke
last week about a machine learning program that induced student bugs from
their errors, and thus provided more focused tutoring that raised their gain
scores relative to tutoring that was not guided by a student model.

The next speaker is Reva Freedman from the University of Illinois, who will
present results from a natural-language based tutoring system (see
announcement below).

If you would like to subscribe to the distribution list for announcements,
send a message to Majordomo at list.pitt.edu with the following lines in the body:

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help

To find out more about CIRCLE (Center for Interdisciplinary Research on
Constructive Learning Environments) see http://www.pitt.edu/~circle or
contact Kurt VanLehn (vanlehn at cs.pitt.edu).

-- Kurt VanLehn, Peter Brusilovsky, Dan Suthers


LEARNING FROM TUTORS, LEARNING FROM TUTORING SYSTEMS

Reva Freedman
Research Associate
Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
Illinois Institute of Technology

Nov. 24, 1997, noon, LRDC 2nd floor auditorium.

The Circsim-Tutor project builds natural-language based tutoring systems
for a causal domain (cardiovascular physiology). One of the goals of the
Circsim-Tutor project is to generate conversations similar in both
pedagogical strategy and language use to tutoring sessions conducted by
expert human tutors. For this reason we have spent considerable time and
energy on the analysis of transcripts, including a multi-level SGML-based
markup of conversational goals.

In this talk I will describe some of our recent results in this area. I
will concentrate on the tutor's responses to unexpected utterances on the
part of the student, including wrong answers, "near-misses", and "don't
know" answers. These responses include several types of changes to the
tutoring plan as well as a possible change in the level of the domain
model being employed. Human tutors are generally not aware of the
dialogue strategies they use at this level of detail.

These results have influenced the design of the current version of
Circsim-Tutor. Of course, the influence is bidirectional, since the model
of mechanized tutoring used affects the phenomena one sees in the
transcripts. I will discuss some issues in the design of dialogue-based
tutoring systems, involving both the representation of pedagogical
strategy and surface text, which this work has brought to light.

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Dr. Peter Brusilovsky <plb at cs.cmu.edu>
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

Phone 412 268 56 84
Fax   412 268 55 76
WWW   http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~plb/home.html