Determining the focus of instruction: content planning for intelligent tutoring systems
Barbara Brecht · 1992
There has been a growing interest among intelligent tutoring systems researchers in providing an explicit instructional component that is responsible for determining what to do next at each point in the instructional interaction. Instructional planning is the process of mapping out a global sequence of instructional goals that provides consistency, coherence, and continuity throughout an instructional session. This thesis presents a novel approach to instructional planning by separating the planning process into two phases: content planning and delivery planning. Although the literature recognizes the distinction between the content of an instructional interaction and the mode of delivery, the majority of instructional planners developed to date have focussed on delivery aspects. This thesis is a detailed investigation into content planning as a precursor activity to delivery planning. One of the primary goals of this research has been to identify the dimensions of knowledge required to make pedagogical decisions, and to explicitly represent and reason about it in a planning paradigm. In order to make informed decisions that will tailor instruction to the individual student, the following types of pedagogical knowledge are required: (a) the concepts to be learned, and the prerequisite and other structural relationships between concepts (e.g. part of and isa); (b) the various abilities in using concepts such as knowing the definition of a concept, being able to analyze behaviour or synthesize a solution using a concept; (c) the typical misconceptions of the domain; and (d) the pedagogical rules that represent a pedagogical philosophy for learning the domain. By providing an explicit pedagogical view of the knowledge to be learned, it is possible to plan effective pedagogical interventions that will help the student to move from their current knowledge state to the next knowledge state that is closer to the desired goal state. The proposed approach, PEPE, is a framework for representing the pedagogical knowledge required to plan the content of instruction. A description of a content planner built on the PEPE approach is provided in the form of an extended example. This content planner uses the various types of pedagogical knowledge in conjunction with a student model to generate content goals, to generate a plan to achieve the content goals, to evaluate the effectiveness of the content plan as it is executed by the delivery planner, and lastly to react in the appropriate manner. An interpretation of PEPE illustrates the flexibility of the approach and highlights the role that content planning can play in a variety of tutoring styles.