Data-Driven Intelligent Tutoring Systems for STEM+C Learning and Teaching

It is wide known that one of the most effective ways to learn is through problem solving. In recent years, it is widely known that problem solving is a central subject and fundamental ability in the teaching and learning. Besides, problem solving is integrated in the STEM+C (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math plus Computing, Coding or Computer Science) fields. Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have been shown to be effective in supporting students' domain-level learning through guided problem solving practice. Intelligent tutoring systems provide personalized feedback (in the form of hints) to students and improve learning at effect sizes approaching that of human tutors. However, creating an ITS to adapt to individual students requires the involvement of experts to provide knowledge about both the academic domain and novice student behavior in that domain’s curriculum. Creating an ITS requires time, resources, and multidisciplinary skills. Because of the large possible range of problem solving behavior for any individual topic, the amount of expert involvement required to create an effective, adaptable tutoring system can be high, especially in open-ended problem solving domains. Data-driven ITSs have shown much promise in increasing effectiveness by analyzing past data in order to quickly generate hints to individual students. However, the fundamental long term goal was to develop “better, faster, and cheaper” ITSs. In this work, the main goal of this paper is to: 1) present ITSs used in the STEM+C education; and 2) introduce data-driven ITSs for STEM+C education.