Steps A Simulated Tutorable Physics Student

This paper describes a prototype of a simulated student that learns by interacting with a human tutor The system solves physics problems while showing its work on a workstation screen and the tutor can intervene at certain points during problem solving to advise the simulated student In particular the tutor can cross out incorrect actions and or enter correct actions These interactions cause the simulated student to delete incorrect rules and learn new rules via plausible inference and explanation based learning Pilot testing with two human tutors suggests that simulated students when developed past the prototype stage could be valuable for training human tutors In addition they provide a computational cognitive task analysis of the skill of learning from a tutor that is potentially useful for designing intelligent tutoring systems