Effective Use of Intelligent Software in High School Math Classrooms

K. R. Koedinger and J. R. Anderson

Abstract

In efforts to move our Intelligent Tutoring Systems from successful demonstrations in the laboratory and college classrooms to the less forgiving setting of urban high school classrooms, we have had to face a number of educational issues that have not typically been part of ITS development. We discuss these issues in the context of a preliminary evaluation of ANGLE, a tutor for geometry theorem proving. Because of recent changes in US mathematics curriculum standards, including "decreased attention" to formal proof in geometry (NCTM, 1989), we needed to think carefully about how best to integrate the system into the new curriculum and, in addition, saw less use than we had originally planned. Nevertheless, the 4-5 weeks of classroom use of ANGLE led to large student gains relative to same-teacher classes, but only for the teacher who had participated in the system development. Two educational lessons have emerged from this evaluation that go beyond our usual concerns for cognitive fidelity and laboratory evaluation. First, we need to be responsive to curriculum changes and issues of integrating tutors into the kind of curricula that educators advocate for the future. Second, we need to better understand the role of the teacher in the classroom use of ITSs and how we can better prepare and support teachers in making full use of the potential of these systems.