Design, Development and Evaluation of the Java Intelligent Tutoring System

摘要

The Java Intelligent Tutoring System (JITS) research project explored the power of a new approach to supporting beginner Java programming students. Using Java's grammar as the core of its production rule base, JITS is embed-ded with extra functionality to detect, predict and correct lexicographical errors in students' code. This additional functionality, developed during this research, is a plug-in to JITS called the Java Error Correction Algorithm (JECA). One experimental group was provided the full JITS (with JECA); the sec-ond experimental group was given the skeleton JITS (without JECA); and the third was the control group which were taught in a traditional classroom envi-ronment. The findings showed that the group using the full version of JITS (with JECA) outperformed the skeleton JITS (without JECA) groups and the traditional classroom taught groups. There was a statistically significant dif-ference (at the p = 0.05 level) between the JITS_JECA group and the JITS_ NOJECA group and between the JITS_JECA group and the control group.