An adaptive Student Centered Curriculum for an intelligent training system

An intelligent tutoring system customizes its presentation of knowledge to the individual needs of each student based on a model of the student. Student models are more complex than other user models because the student is likely to have misconceptions. We have addressed several difficult issues in reasoning about a student's knowledge and skills within a real-time simulation-based training system. Our conceptual framework enables important aspects of the tutor's reasoning to be based upon simple, comprehensible representations that are the basis for a Student Centered Curriculum. We have built a system for teaching cardiac resuscitation techniques in which the decisions abouthow to teach are separated from the decisions aboutwhat to teach. The training context (i.e., choice of topics) is changed based on a tight interaction between student modeling techniques and simulation management. Although complex student models are still required to support detailed reasoning about how to teach, we argue that the decision about what to teach can be adequately supported by qualitatively simpler techniques, such as overlay models. This system was evaluated in formative studies involving medical school faculty and students. Construction of the student model involves monitoring student actions during a simulation and evaluating these actions in comparison with an expert model encoded as a multi-agent plan. The plan recognition techniques used in this system are novel and allow the expert knowledge to be expressed in a form that is natural for domain experts.