A Large-Scale Evaluation of an Intelligent Discovery World: Smithtown

Abstract Smithtown is an intelligent tutoring system designed to enhance an individual's scientific inquiry skills as well as to provide an environment for learning principles of basic microeconomics. It was hypothesized that computer instruction on applying effective interrogative skills (e.g., changing one variable at a time while holding all else constant) would ultimately lead to the acquisition of the specific subject matter. This paper presents an evaluation of Smithtown in two studies of individual differences in learning. Experiment 1, an exploratory study, demonstrated that Smithtown fared very well when compared to traditional instruction on economics and delineated the performance indicators which separated better from worse learners in this discovery environment. Experiment 2 extended the findings from the exploratory study using a large sample of subjects (N = 530) from a different population interacting with Smithtown and showed that the performance indicators relating to hypothesis generati...