A Formative Assessment with a Confidence-level Indicator for an Intelligent Tutoring System

Abstract

An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is a computer program that has intelligence and can provide a learner individualized one-on-one tutoring. An ITS is built on four critical components: the Student, Expert, Tutor, and Interface models. This paper focused on the development of the Student Model, the component that is in charge of assessing what the learner already knows about the topic domain. To this effect, the proponents recognized the importance of incorporating formative assessments to the Student Model such that the ITS may adapt to teaching methodologies that are tailor-fitted to the student’s learning process. The developed Student Model is packaged into an Application Programming Interface (API). It employs a formative, multiple-choice type, pre-assessment and could be integrated into an ITS that teaches HTML 5. Traditionally, the result of a multiple-choice test is quantitative. Although this data is invaluable, the proponents recognized that an ITS may further benefit if the result is also qualitative. Therefore, a Confidence-Level Indicator (CLI) is integrated into each test item such that the examiner may also state, together with his answer, his level of confidence to his chosen answer. This improvement may prove to be beneficial to the implementation of other Student Models because it allows active participation of the learner to his learning process.