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The Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT): Preliminary Evaluation of Efficiency Gains
journal contribution
posted on 2006-01-01, 00:00 authored by Vincent Aleven, Bruce M. McLaren, Jonathan Sewall, Kenneth R. KoedingerIntelligent Tutoring Systems have been shown to be effective in a
number of domains, but they remain hard to build, with estimates of 200-300
hours of development per hour of instruction. Two goals of the Cognitive Tutor
Authoring Tools (CTAT) project are to (a) make tutor development more
efficient for both programmers and non-programmers and (b) produce scientific
evidence indicating which tool features lead to improved efficiency. CTAT
supports development of two types of tutors, Cognitive Tutors and Example-
Tracing Tutors, which represent different trade-offs in terms of ease of
authoring and generality. In preliminary small-scale controlled experiments
involving basic Cognitive Tutor development tasks, we found efficiency gains
due to CTAT of 1.4 to 2 times faster. We expect that continued development of
CTAT, informed by repeated evaluations involving increasingly complex
authoring tasks, will lead to further efficiency gains.