Creating a Team Tutor Using GIFT

Abstract

With the movement in education towards collaborative learning, it is becoming more important that learners be able to work together in groups and teams. Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have been used successfully to teach individuals, but so far only a few ITSs have been used for the purpose of training teams. This is due to the difficulty of creating such systems. An ITS for teams must be able to assess complex interactions between team members (team skills) as well as the way they interact with the system itself (task skills). Assessing team skills can be difficult because they contain social components such as communication and coordination that are not readily quantifiable. This article addresses these difficulties by developing a framework to guide the authoring process for team tutors. The framework is demonstrated using a case study about a particular team tutor that was developed using a military surveillance scenario for teams of two. The Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT) software provided the team tutoring infrastructure for this task. A new software architecture required to support the team tutor is described. This theoretical framework and the lessons learned from its implementation offer conceptual scaffolding for future authors of ITSs.

Five Lenses on Team Tutor Challenges: A Multidisciplinary Approach

“…Over the past several years, the authors and their colleagues developed and conducted research with the Surveillance Task (two-person team, both same role), the Surveillance with Sniper Task (three-person team, one sniper and two spotter roles), and the Team Multiple Errands Task (three-person team, all the same role). The Surveillance Task is described in more detail in Bonner et al (2016; and Gilbert et al (2017). Each of two team members play the role of a spotter atop a building in the center of a small town and must report to each other when people on the ground below move out of one member's zone into the other member's zone, e.g., "Two people entering your zone at the pole.…”

“…Our goal in this chapter is to provide lessons learned from our experience in developing three ITTSs to give future developers an understanding of the challenges they will need to resolve. We briefly describe the ITTSs we developed and then introduce the four main challenges we encountered; more details can be found elsewhere in Gilbert et al (2017). We then introduce and discuss how an interdisciplinary perspective, through the lenses of five different research domains, can enable developers to address each challenge.…”

Special Issue on the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT): Creating a Stable and Flexible Platform for Innovations in AIED Research

“…While GIFT has been used as an ITS authoring and experimental tool across a variety of task domains including more traditional topics in science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) (e.g., Renduchitnala and Matthews 2017;Warta 2017), this special issue focused on three distinctive topics: 1) sensitivity to learner affect (DeFalco et al 2017), adaptive training of psychomotor tasks (Goldberg et al 2017), and 3) adaptive instruction of teams (Fletcher and Sottilare 2017;Gilbert et al 2017;Sottilare et al 2017aSottilare et al , 2017b. Although each article describes a functional capability of significant importance to military training and education, we propose that the processes described therein could easily be transferred and applied to parallel civilian training and educational domains.…”

“…In this special issue, Gilbert et al (2017) discuss the design and evaluation of an instructional approach to represent taskwork for teams in ITSs. This article discusses some of the challenges in extending GIFT to author ITSs for teams.…”

The Irresistible Use of Contexts in Chemistry Education

“…These programs have stimulated the development of alternative programs. In a special issue of the International Journal of Science Education [15] context oriented science education was highlighted, as a way to improve the appreciation of students for science.…”