RMT in the Classroom

Research Methods Tutor (RMT) is a dialog-based intelligent tutoring system designed for use in conjunction with courses in psychology research methods. The current RMT system includes five topic sections: ethics, variables, reliability, validity, and experimental design. The tutor can be used in an “agent mode,” which utilizes synthesized speech and an interactive pedagogical agent, or in a “textonly mode,” which presents the tutor content in written text on the screen. The tutor was used in three psychology research methods courses during the winter and spring quarters of 2006 at DePaul University. These three sections were evaluated against two (non-equivalent) control sections that did not use the RMT system. Pretest and posttest scores on a research methods knowledge test were used to assess learning in each class. Results indicated that, compared with the two control sections, the classes that used RMT showed significantly higher learning gains. In addition, those that used the agent version of the tutor showed significantly higher learning gains than those who used the text-only version of the tutor. Future directions will focus on expanding the current RMT content to include conceptual statistics and more complex research designs and to identify subgroups of students for which RMT may be particularly useful.