Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recently there has been controversy about whether Intelligent Tutoring Systems are. even potentially, more effective than standard C A L programs, that is, whether it is educationally more valuable to attempt to identify the cause of user's mistakes rather than merely explain the correct method. This issue was addressed by comparative testing of two versions of the S U M I T Intelligent Tutoring Assistant for arithmetic using a diagnostic version, which diagnosed errors and gave appropriate messages, and a 'CAL' version was identical in all respects except that it made no diagnoses and therefore gave standard error messages indicating the correct method. In a comparative study of the two versions, a class of 9 year old children were flrst divided into two matched groups on the basis of a pencil and paper pre-tesi, then both groups had two 30 minute individual sessions with the appropriate version of SUMIT, and then performance was assessed on a subsequent pencil and paper post-test. Both groups improved significantly in their performance from pre-test to post-test, but the diagnostic group showed significantly greater reductions in the number of bugs. It is concluded that diagnostic remediation can be more effective than non-diagnostic approaches.