Despite the critical role of teachers in the educational process, few advanced learning technologies have been developed to support teacher-instruction or professional development. This lack of support is particularly acute for middle school math teachers, where only 37% felt well prepared to scaffold instruction to address the needs of diverse students in a national sample. To address this gap, the Advancing Middle School Teachers’ Understanding of Proportional Reasoning project is researching techniques to apply pedagogical virtual agents and dialog-based tutoring to enhance teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. This paper describes the design of a conversational, agent-based intelligent tutoring system to support teachers' professional development. Pedagogical strategies are presented that leverage a virtual human facilitator to tutor pedagogical content knowledge (how to teach proportions to students), as opposed to content knowledge (understanding proportions). The roles for different virtual facilitator capabilities are presented, including embedding actions into virtual agent dialog, open-response versus choice-based tutoring, ungraded pop-up sub-activities (e.g. whiteboard, calculator, note-taking). Usability feedback for a small cohort of instructors pursuing graduate studies was collected. In this feedback, teachers rated the system ease of use and perceived usefulness moderately well, but also reported confusion about what to expect from the system in terms of flow between lessons and support by the facilitator.
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OpenTutor: Designing a Rapid-Authored Tutor that Learns as you Grade
Despite strong evidence that dialog-based intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) can increase learning gains, few courses include these tutors. In this research, we posit that existing dialog-based tutoring systems are not widely used because they are too complex and unfamiliar for a typical teacher to adapt or augment. OpenTutor is an open-source research project intended to scale up dialog-based tutoring by enabling ordinary teachers to rapidly author and improve dialog-based ITS, where authoring is presented through familiar tasks such as assessment item creation and grading. Formative usability results from a set of five non-CS educators are presented, which indicate that the OpenTutor system was relatively easy to use but that teachers would closely consider the cost benefit for time vs. student outcomes. Specifically, while OpenTutor grading was faster than expected, teachers reported that they would only spend any additional time (compared to a multiple choice) if the content required deeper learning. To decrease time to train answer classifiers, OpenTutor is investigating ways to reduce cold-start problems for tutoring dialogs.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1852583
- PAR ID:
- 10313588
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The International FLAIRS Conference Proceedings
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2334-0762
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.32473/flairs.v34i1.128576
