Master of Science in Computer Engineering (MSCE), Wright State University, 2017, Computer Engineering

The traditional education systems that have been used for several centuries have evolved very slowly and might be ineffective for addressing diverse learning styles and levels of preparation. This system is characterized by many students interacting with a single teacher, who is unable to address the individual needs of every student. Therefore, some students can become frustrated and fail to reach their educational potential. An Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), which is a computer application used to provide students with one-to-one supplemental tutoring tailored to the student's learning style and pace, is of interest to educators for improving student learning. To evaluate the effectiveness of ITS, a systematic review of the recent literature was performed using a carefully crafted protocol designed to provide data to support a meta-study of the effectiveness of ITS. The research question guiding this study is: “Does an intelligent tutoring system improve students' learning abilities more than traditional learning?” A t-test, one-way ANOVA test, and KNIME program that does Latent Dirichlet allocation were performed. The results support the conclusion that ITS causes a significant improvement in learning over traditional instructional methods.

Committee: Mateen Rizki Ph.D. (Advisor); Michael Raymer Ph.D. (Committee Co-Chair); Jack Jean Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Engineering; Computer Science

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2000, Engineering : Computer Science and Engineering

A novel Web-based intelligent tutoring system, called Arthur, is developed in this work. This system provides adaptive instruction between various instruction methods that are created by expert tutors. Intelligent tutoring systems are forms of expert systems, where each tutor is an expert in the field and has a different instruction style. Arthur makes use of learning styles theory (Dunn 1978) and mastery learning (Bloom 1976), from education, and case-based reasoning (Kolodner 1993), from artificial intelligence, to bring this new style of asynchronous instruction to the World Wide Web. Case-based reasoning is used to adaptively change instruction methods when corrective instruction is necessary. Unlike the traditional tutoring environment or classroom environment where there is a one-to-one relationship or one-to-many relationshp between the tutor and student or students, Arthur provides a many-to-one relationship between the tutors and student. Imagine taking a course where the student has an unlimited number of tutors available. The purpose of this system is to provide effective instruction via the Web in search of "A Significant Difference" (Russell 1999) in learner outcomes. Chapter 1 gives an introduction to this research. Chapter 2 reviews previous contributions through other Web-based systems that consider learning style as part of their design. Chapter 3 will focus on Arthur's design and explain "What is Arthur?" Chapter 4 discusses the experiment and the experiment results. Finally, Chapter 5 will summarize Arthur and its contributions.

Committee: Chia Han (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, Educational Theory and Practice

With the rise of technology use in college classrooms, many professors are open to structuring their classrooms in innovative ways. The classroom flip (or inverted classroom) is one such innovative classroom structure that moves the lecture outside the classroom via technology and moves homework and practice with concepts inside the classroom via learning activities. This research compares the classroom flip and the traditional lecture/homework structure in two different college level introductory statistics classrooms. In the classroom flip classroom, an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) was used to deliver the lecture content outside the classroom. Students completed active learning projects in the classroom that often required the use of a spreadsheet computer program to help students work with the concepts in the course. In the lecture/homework classroom, students attended lectures on course content that included PowerPoint slides, and then students practiced with the course concepts by completing homework from their books outside of class. The learning environment and the learning activity in both classrooms are investigated in this study with respect to activity theory and learning environments research. Students were given the College and University Classroom Environment Inventory (CUCEI) to measure both their learning environment preferences and their learning environment experiences. In addition, data were collected via field notes, classroom transcripts, student interviews, student focus groups, researcher journal entries, and student reflections. The quantitative data were analyzed using t-tests and MANOVA, and the qualitative data were analyzed using grounded theory methods. The findings of this research show that classroom flip students were less satisfied with how the structure of the classroom oriented them to the learning tasks in the course. The variety of learning activities in the flipped classroom contributed to an unsettledness among students th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Douglas Owens (Advisor) Subjects: