ED-MEDIA 1999 Proceedings Book - Association for the ...

adapted tests to assess the student acquisition of knowledge. The test, usually does not contain items used
before and the items are about content that the student has already seen. Of course, the items can also include
the characteristic of multimedia and analytic previously commented. Fourth, It creates new activities
to make the students keep working on those concepts that they have not acquired (looking at the results of a
test). Fifth, the system provides a book of Basque grammar (hyperized) whose presentation adapts to the
student travel throughout the knowledge.
The system is not totally valid without the help of a human teacher. The teacher can complement
and assure the correct performance of the system. He or she can supervise the activities the student is
working on and add (in most cases) or delete (rarely) activities to make the system adapt better to the student.
It is supposed that these decisions are taken after some contact with the students or any other interaction
apart from the system. Besides, in language-learning there is a lack in working or assessing essays.
There are some aspects, such as the writing style, that have not been solved yet and where the help of a
human teacher can be very helpful.
Of course, the users may adapt their interaction with the system asking for optional activities
stressing on either the same concepts or concepts related to the concepts that an activity covers. Once the
students have completed an activity, they may notice that they need further work on the contents it is
stressing.
This paper describes EGA-Hezinet, an AHS for education. Next section will describe the structure
of the pedagogical domain as pedagogues organized it. Then, a brief guide of the activities is given. Activities
are the method that the system provides to let the student learn within a constructivist approach. After
that, the architecture of the system is explained. Eventually, some conclusions are given.
The Structure of the Pedagogical Domain
The pedadogues in Basque language defined the structure of the pedagogical domain. They designated
content (concept) as the basic unit (Fig. 1). Some of them are key concepts. The pedagogues create
activities according to these units. Contents are grouped into work areas and families. So far, there are 10
working areas, namely: declination, verb, syntax, vocabulary, suffix, orthography, connectors, written expression,
speech comprehension, and reading comprehension. These work areas and families give the system
some knowledge to recommend the student to practice certain activities related in some way to one
concrete activity. The system offers activities related to the family of the main content of an activity or to
the group.
Figure 1: A graphical representation of the structure of the Pedagogical Domain