Enhancing Decision Sciences Education through Intelligent Tutors
Jr . Owen P. Hall · 2009
Globalization is bringing about a radical “rethink” regarding the delivery of graduation management education particularly in the discipline of decision sciences. Today, many students entering an MBA program do not possess an undergraduate degree in business and thus have a limited background in decision sciences. Furthermore, there is a growing trend toward de-emphasizing decision sciences in MBA programs. As a result, many business schools are turning to the Internet to provide “customized” instructional content to insure that graduates possess the requisite technical skills to meet the demands of the marketplace. Intelligent tutors represent one approach to address these challenges. These systems provide customized learning and feedback based on student characteristics and performance. The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) to review the current direction in Internet-based intelligent tutors; and 2) to report on a preliminary evaluation regarding the performance and effectiveness of an intelligent tutor system to support decision sciences education. The tentative results from the study indicate that students that used an intelligent tutor in a decision science course significantly increased examination performance.