Empowering the student: prospects for an unintelligent tutoring system

Computer based instructional systems either direct students so modelling their actions is tractable, or provide them with total autonomy, but give little support to learning and problem solving processes. Instructional principles for empowering the student are emerging whereby more of the responsibility of diagnosis and goal-setting is placed on the student. Critical to this view is providing an environment which makes the ramifications of students' actions clear so students can meaningfully assess their own performance. In the domain of word algebra, the meaning of formal expressions can be reflected in computer animation which depicts the corresponding situation. An unintelligent tutor — knowing nothing of the problem being solved and possessing no student model — helps students to understand problems and debug formal expressions.

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