Tutoring rule authoring system for intelligent computer-aided instruction: hypothetico-deductive problem solving in physiology (CAI)

A powerful and easy-to-use authoring system known as the Tutoring Rule Authoring System (TRAS) has been developed that can be used to write rules for any system that organizes its knowledge in "IF conditions THEN actions" format. TRAS makes it possible to write rules interactively without making syntactic errors. We are currently using TRAS to write tutoring rules for the Intelligent Physiology Tutor (IPT). IPT may be used by first-year medical students to learn how to solve pathophysiology problems using the hypothetico-deductive method. In IPT, we have attempted to keep the how-to-teach knowledge separate from the what-to-teach knowledge. This separation will allow the tutor to be used in other domains also. TRAS has been implemented in Turbo Pascal (3.0). IPT is being implemented in Turbo Prolog. Both TRAS and IPT run on IBM PCs or compatibles. This work was motivated by our concern about the decline in the quality of education in American schools and colleges over the last 30 years. The lack of individualized instruction is considered to be a major cause for this decline. Although one-to-one tutoring enables most students to attain a high level of achievement, it is too expensive to be adopted on a large scale. Modern computers seem to have the potential of providing one-to-one tutoring in an affordable way if high quality instructional programs are developed. It is widely recognized that such programs cannot be developed without the involvement of experienced teachers. At present, the lack of desirable authoring tools requires teachers, who wish to develop programs to teach complex material, to also play the role of expert programmers. Thus in order to effectively use computers in education, a new generation of authoring tools is needed. These tools, in addition to being easy to use, must be powerful enough to allow development of complex instructional programs. TRAS may be viewed as one such tool.