We created a list of more than 140 tools that can be used to create tutoring systems, from complete tutoring systems to low-level tools for preparing instructional materials. Based on this list, we present a preliminary ontology of system dimensions that can serve as a base for a comprehensive review or in building systems. We also note that: (a)…

Librarians are often asked to create instructional experiences and/or learning objects to teach students to avoid plagiarizing. Creating an effective tutorial not only requires following good instruction design principles but also understanding why and when students plagiarize and how to address students effectively about plagiarism. This article…

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of interactive and demonstration (non-interactive) video tutorials for software training on the effectiveness of procedural learning and student satisfaction. An analysis of signalling made by instructional designers was carried out to develop high-quality instructional video materials. These…

To provide personalized help to students who are working on code-writing problems, we introduce a data-driven tutoring system, ITAP (Intelligent Teaching Assistant for Programming). ITAP uses state abstraction, path construction, and state reification to automatically generate personalized hints for students, even when given states that have not…

Background and Context: Recursion in binary trees has proven to be a hard topic. There was not much research on enhancing student understanding of this topic. Objective: We present a tutorial to enhance learning through practice of recursive operations in binary trees, as it is typically taught post-CS2. Method: We identified the misconceptions…

This project assesses the ability of a game tutorial, "Goblin Threat" to increase university students' ability to recognize plagiarized passages. The game tutorial covers information about how to cite properly, types and consequences of plagiarism, and the differences between paraphrasing and plagiarism. The game involves finding and…

Self-evaluation of one's competences is considered a core factor in various domains of human functioning, including learning and instruction, as well as academic and vocational choices. Researchers from the fields of metacognition and learning, as well as motivation and learning have thus intensively investigated issues related to the…

Recursion is one of the most important and hardest topics in lower division computer science courses. As it is an advanced programming skill, the best way to learn it is through targeted practice exercises. But the best practice problems are time consuming to manually grade by an instructor. As a consequence, students historically have completed…

Virtual agents have been shown to be more effective when incorporating social factors such as trust into task action selection. However, there has been less work on how virtual tutoring agents can incorporate social factors into pedagogical action selection. We propose and evaluate how a socially-conditioned task reasoner for a virtual pedagogical…

Sharing user information between systems is an area of interest for every field involving personalization. Recommender Systems are more advanced in this aspect than Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and Intelligent Learning Environments (ILEs). A reason for this is that the user models of Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Intelligent Learning…

Tutoring with Alphie is a computer-assisted programme that aims to improve the literacy skills of struggling readers. The programme combines elements of collaborative (or 'cooperative') learning, computer-assisted instruction and small group support. Participating pupils are grouped in pairs and follow a series of activities that seek to improve…

Building intelligent tutoring systems presents significant challenges -- one challenge arises because tutoring is concerned with unobservable inner workings of the human brain; another results from the formidable task of knowledge representation and reasoning; still a third is due to the competing theories of teaching and learning. Over the past…

Secondary teachers participating in summer professional development chemistry workshops in Texas used an online chemistry tutoring program, OWL Quick Prep (Day et al. in OWL: Online Web-based Learning, Brooks-Cole Cengage Learning, Florence, KY, 1997) as a part of the inservice training. Self-reported demographic data were used to identify factors…

Evidence collected on the effectiveness of four educational technologies is briefly reviewed. The authors conclude that there is reasonable evidence that computer-assisted instruction can have at least a modest effect on improving learning and probably more when its instructional approaches are properly matched to instructional objectives, that…

Working as a legislative reference librarian at the Connecticut State Library exposes the author to many complex topics. Law, by nature, is a multidisciplinary field involving social issues and legal ramifications. Each year when the legislature is in session (January-June during even years, February-May during odd years), the Legislative Bill…