Consolidating the Results of the CIRCSIM-Tutor Project and Further Consolidation of the Results of the CIRCSIM-Tutor Project

摘要

This grant supported the writing of a book on the author's experiments in human and computer tutoring and enabled the running of one last experiment with the CIRCSIM-Tutor system, Version 2.9. The experiment compared the learning gains made by medical students using the CIRCSIM-Tutor system with those made by students reading a carefully edited relevant text. The experiment was suggested at a meeting of ONR Grantees in the tutoring portion of the Cognitive Science Program. The author carried out this experiment in November 2002. It showed, as she had hoped, that the 40 students who used CIRCSIM-Tutor for an hour made significantly greater learning gains than the 33 who read a carefully chosen and edited text. What is more, over 80% of the CIRCSIM-Tutor students completed all eight problems as opposed to 60% in the experiment in November 1999. The system did not crash. It corrected 104 spelling errors without making any identifiable miscorrections, and it did not get caught up in any of the confusions that turned up in earlier experiments. The students expressed enthusiasm about the tutor. None of them felt compelled to curse the system, as had happened in the past. The author would like to believe that this was because it was less frustrating to use, but it may just have been due to the number of observers present. This report describes the results of the experiment, gives a more detailed description of the natural language understanding results, and summarizes some of the author's other current research. A bibliography of 14 publications is included.