Using an ITS as an Arithmetic Assistant for Teachers – 3-year Review

This paper summarizes the results of three years of research into using an ontology-based system called InfoMap for e-learning. Using InfoMap, we develop an empirical platform to collect information about mathematical errors made by elementary school students in Taiwan. In our intelligent tutoring system (ITS), InfoMap represents the curriculum, as well as the knowledge of experts and teachers. We use the relation between the curriculum and expert knowledge to analyze students’ arithmetic errors and determine where the system’s knowledge is deficient. Following the work of Brown and Burton, we develop a method called Process Map to describe procedural knowledge in our ITS. After a three-year empirical study, we found that eleven error types in Brown and Burton’s “Buggy Model” do not apply to Taiwanese students. Significantly, we also found that some errors appear to apply only to Taiwanese students.