Crosstalk Seminar - Thu., Nov 18, 2:00 p.m.

The Promise and Reality of Web-based Tutoring
Professor David E. Pritchard, MIT physics department
Thursday, November 18, 2004
2:00 p.m.
Room 4-231

Abstract
Textbooks, Lectures, and most educational uses of the web are like broadcast radio: a message is prepared and broadcast, one can find out how many people are listening, but knowing that the message has been received remains elusive. In my view the great promise of the web is two way learning: individual responses for the student, formative and summative assessment for the teacher, and data and guidance to help the author improve the material and the pedagogy. Web-based intelligent tutors offer interactive tutoring for individual students, such as pedagogically useful responses to their wrong answers and hints and simpler subproblems upon student request.

Our research shows that one such tutor (see www.mycybertutor.com) teaches about twice as much per unit time as hand-graded written homework. Feedback from the students can reveal specific student mistakes and misconceptions, provide rich data allowing authors to improve their content, and show class difficulties on each problem for Just In Time Teaching. Our research shows that assessing the process of solution can give a far more accurate profile of student skills than can testing, allowing targeted remediatioin. Splitting the class into two groups that work the same problem after one group has been given a tutorial allows us to measure and improve the amount of learning per unit time from the tutorial. We are currently investigating why some pedagogies transfer several times more knowledge per unit of student time than others.

Powerpoint slides of the presentation. (~4mb)