Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Domains - Philippe ...

15 Hodhod & Kudenko
components, concepts and skills, in a curriculum unit. The cognitive tutor also
presents the student with a similar activity if it doesn’t seem that the student did well
on the first activity.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 motivates the work. Section 3
illustrates the AEINS architecture and the main idea. Student/player free agency
versus controlled agency is discussed in section 4. Teaching moments and Kohlberg’s
dilemmas are demonstrated in section 5. Finally, concluding remarks and future work
are presented in Section 6.
2 Background
Interactive narrative has been used in education for the last decade. Systems like
FEARNOT! [1], TEATRIX [2], IN-TALE [3], TIME [4], are examples of these
investigations. The main aim of these systems is to challenge the student to think
about the problem more deeply and to assimilate a new view via social emersion. The
success of the system is measured by the change of the student’s behavior and/or his
cognition towards the presented problems. The main drawback in these systems is the
lack of a cognitive tutor.
Our approach to address the cognitive tutor problem is to incorporate intelligent
tutoring techniques to interactive narrative in order to teach ill defined domains.
Intelligent tutoring provides direct customized instruction or feedback to students and
helps to maintain immersion and engagement with the learning process. In this case,
the student will be able to act freely within the narrative environment influencing the
path of the story, and at the same time be monitored and guided by the cognitive tutor.
In addition, the system will be able to present the suitable educational dilemma and
offer personalized feedback, according to the student’s actions. The feedback will be
within the context of the story emphasizing the consequences of the student’s actions
and decisions in the provided safe learning environment. This kind of social
interaction associated with the appropriate feedback can spark new thoughts and can
provide deeper insights for the student.
Having a tutor model side by side with a narrative model seems promising in welldefined
domains. Mott et al. in [9] presented a guided exploratory learning
environment, Crystal Island. The authors take the same approach as us regarding the
way the tutoring and narrative components interact together. The learning
environment is created in the domain of microbiology for middle school students. The
results of this work proves that students exhibited learning gains (learning gain, M =
0.07, SD = 0.14) [10].
An outstanding example of moral dilemmas that can be used in education is the
series of Kohlberg’s moral dilemmas. These dilemmas have not been used before in
any educational digital system. We think those dilemmas are appropriate to be used as
teaching moments which are part of the system educational domain, ethics and
citizenship. These dilemmas offer the student the chance to face some social
dilemmas, which otherwise the student might not have or faced. Interacting with these
dilemmas offers the chance to create and develop new and deeper thoughts.