An empirically-based, tutorial dialogue system

Design, implementation and evaluation in a first year health sciences course

Abstract

This paper presents one possible approach to providing individualised and immediate feedback to students' written responses to short-answer questions. The classroom context for this study is a large first-year undergraduate health sciences course. The motivation for our approach is explained through a brief history of intelligent tutoring systems, the philosophical and educational positions which inspired their development and the practical and epistemological issues which have largely prevented their uptake in a higher education context . The design and implementation of a new empirically-based tutorial dialogue system is described along with the results of in-class evaluation of the new system with 578 student volunteers.