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Adding Weights to Constraints in Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Does It Improve the Error Diagnosis?

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6964))

Abstract

The constraint-based modeling (CBM) approach for deve-loping intelligent tutoring systems has shown useful in several domains. However, when applying this approach to an exploratory environment where students are allowed to explore a large solution space for problems to be solved, this approach encounters its limitation: It is not well suited to determine the solution variant the student intended. As a consequence, system’s corrective feedback might be not in accordance with the student’s intention. To address this problem, this paper proposes to adopt a soft computing approach for solving constraint satisfaction problems. The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, we will show that classical CBM is not well-suited for building a tutoring system for tasks which have a large solution space. Second, we introduce a weighted constraint-based model for intelligent tutoring systems. An evaluation study shows that a coaching system for logic programming based on the weighted constraint-based model is able to determine the student’s intention correctly in 90.3% of 221 student solutions, while a corresponding tutoring system using classical CBM can only hypothesize the student’s intention correctly in 35.5% of the same corpus.

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Le, NT., Pinkwart, N. (2011). Adding Weights to Constraints in Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Does It Improve the Error Diagnosis?. In: Kloos, C.D., Gillet, D., Crespo García, R.M., Wild, F., Wolpers, M. (eds) Towards Ubiquitous Learning. EC-TEL 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6964. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23985-4_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23985-4_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23984-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23985-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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