Student modelling in intelligent tutoring systems for Prolog programming

This paper discusses the modelling of novice Prolog programmers for the development of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for Prolog programming. The main components of an ITS are the expert module, the student module, the tutoring module and the communication module. The student model represents what the student does and does not understand, what type of student he/she is and what he/she has done. An ITS monitors the behaviour of the student, looking for discrepancies from the ideal specification, tracks discrepancies back to errors in the student's presumed world model and repairs the student by instruction. The knowledge of the subject material in an ITS for computer programming includes: (i) the knowledge of the syntax and semantics of the language, (ii) strategic and tactical knowledge of how to decompose the problem and of how to compose the constructs of the language and (iii) pragmatic knowledge of how to conduct an effective dialogue with the programming environment. A model of the student which is expressed as a sub-set of the knowledge being taught is known as an 'overlay' model. This approach is limited to situations where experts and novices use same skills. A 'differential' student model provides the capability of recognizing and then acting upon a student's misconception, for example that 'WHILE' and 'IF' may be interchanged in Pascal