Intelligent Case Selection and Presentation

Designers of AI educational systems have largely ignored the problem of choosing what information to present and how to present it because systems to date have not been faced with a large space of possible presentations. This paper explains how a student model can provide the knowledge needed to make presentation decisions. Systems that use a student model for this purpose can make problems more interesting, challenging, and hand-tailored to students. We describe DECIDER: a program that improves student's decision-making abilities by constructing an environment where they can confront problems and decide on a plan of action. DECIDER chooses from a database of decision-making problems and varies how it presents those problems based on a model of the student's knowledge of goals, plans, and priorities.