Applying Real-Time Dynamic Scaffolding Techniques during Tutoring Sessions Using Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Abstract

An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a computer system or software application that is built to replicate human tutors by supporting the theory of “learning by doing.” Even though ITSs have been proven to be successful in academic studies, they still have not found large adoption by the industry due to the complexities of building such systems due to the high technical expertise and domain knowledge requirements. Attempts have been made to build authoring tools that can provide assistance in building tutoring systems; however, most of these tools are targeted toward authors that have considerable programming experience. This research proposes an authoring tool for ITS, which is targeted at novice authors with minimum technical/programming experience and provides real-time scaffolding to learner’s incomplete/incorrect answers using the best scaffolding techniques. Two evaluation techniques were applied for the evaluation of the performance of the proposed authoring tool, e.g., paired t-test analysis and postexperiment survey. The learning gains obtained from paired t-test contend a significant learning gain and improvement in the learning process with enhanced learning performance with multiple scaffolding techniques as compared to single scaffolding technique experience. The postexperiment survey has a notable result that shows the effectiveness of the tutor model that ensures a very user-friendly interface, deploying scaffolding techniques and adequate control of selecting and deploying scaffolding techniques and making the authoring process easy.