Simple tutors for hard problems
Matthew Hockenberry · 2005
The construction of cognitive tutors is often focused on tightly constrained domains. This is because the creation of a cognitive tutor is a time-intensive process. Pseudo-tutors allow us to model a small number of problems in a relatively short time. There is no need to program a general cognitive model if we can demonstrate this model by example. The creation of a relatively small set of examples can have real cognitive benefit to the student.The LSAT Analytic Logic Tutor demonstrates that this is possible. This tutor was designed for teaching strategies for solving analytic logic games. Although such a task would be difficult to model in general, three rich problems produced enough of an impact to significantly improve student performance. This is an interesting example where a small suite of well-designed pseudo tutors are significantly more useful than a full cognitive tutor.