Attitudes

COCA, which consists of both authoring tools and a runtime shell, is a system intended to provide teachers with genuine access to intelligent tutoring system (ITS) technology and to give them control over domain material and teaching strategies. To evaluate the effectiveness of COCA, 10 subjects (five university teachers and five school teachers) were given an authoring task and asked to complete a questionnaire. The subjects were presented with domain material (the American Revolution) , an initial teaching st,ategy and a meta-teaching strategy in the form of prepared knowledge bases, and a set of instructions for altering the teaching behavior of the final system and extending the domain material. The questionnaire covered the general use of COCA, the suitability of the teaching strategy representation, the domain representation, and how subjects ' opinions of AI (artificial intelligence) in general and COCA in particular had changed as a result of the task. Results indicate that school teachers ' attitudes toward AI improved and university teachers ' attitudes remained positive; COCA was found to be successful for simple tutoring systems, yet too difficult to use. (Contains 17 references.) (AEF) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document