Building Cognitive Tutors with Programming by Demonstration

The aim of this study is to incorporate the technique of programming by demonstration (PBD) into an authoring tool for Cognitive Tutors. The primary motivation of using PBD is to facilitate the authoring of Cognitive Tutors by educators, rather than AI programmers. That is, instead of asking authors to build a cognitive model representing a task to be taught, a machine-learning agent – called the Simulated Student – observes the author performing the target task and induces production rules that replicate the author’s performance. FOIL is used to learn conditions appearing in the production rules. An evaluation in an example domain of algebra equation solving shows that observing 10 problems solved in 44 steps induced 9 correct and 1 wrong production rules. Two of the correctly induced rules were overly general hence produced redundant solutions.