Cooperative Student Models

. There are benefits for a tutoring system that can tailor its feedback and presentation to meet the needs of individual students. However, there are numerous difficulties with obtaining enough information for an accurate student model. To help remedy this, our tutor prompts the student to provide information that it cannot detect by itself. We call this a cooperative student model as the model is constructed jointly from the student's and the tutor's beliefs. There are potential pitfalls to this approach, including the student being either over or under confident, or simply being unable to accurately report his level of ability in the subject matter. We have constructed a framework that accounts for these problems. In addition to simply improving the tutor's accuracy, this cooperative model provides the user with some means of taking part in deciding how future interactions with the tutor will progress. This system was given an initial and two follow up evaluations in classrooms. The ..