Characteristic factors and components of different modules in expert systems for intelligent tutoring system

Abstract

Expert systems (ES) have been developed and widely used in the area of tutoring and education. Most of the ES in tutoring systems do not specify its name as ES but these embody the characteristics and features of ES, particularly knowledge representation, reasoning and interface. The different modules of ES in intelligent tutoring system (ES-ITS), i.e., student, pedagogical/tutor and domain (subject) speak of the three components of ES more or less but there is a significant lack of description of various characteristic factors and components that govern the performance of ITS. This work makes a review to identify cognitive, psychological, mental and social components in student model; teaching method and evaluation methodology, problem presentation, evaluation system and feedback strategy in pedagogical/tutor model. Implementation platform and software used by different ES-ITS have been described. Observations in the form of tables and graphs have been made to show the variation of different characteristic factors and components in different modules. © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.