Authoring Tutors with SimStudent: An Evaluation of Efficiency and Model Quality

Abstract. Authoring Intelligent Tutoring Systems is expensive and time consuming. To reduce costs, the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools and the Example-Tracing Tutor paradigm were developed to make the tutor authoring process more efficient. Under this paradigm, tutors are con-structed by demonstrating behavior directly in a tutor interface, reducing the need for programming expertise. This paper evaluates the efficiency of authoring a tutor with SimStudent, an extension to the Example-Tracing paradigm that is designed to produce greater generality in less time by induction from past demonstrations and feedback. We found that authoring an algebra tutor in SimStudent is faster than Example-Tracing while maintaining equivalent final model quality. Furthermore, we found that the SimStudent model generalizes beyond the problems that were used to author it.