Using Students’ Learning Curves to Assess the Quality of Hints and Feedback in an Intelligent Tutoring System
Summary
With traditional education facing challenges in delivering personalized instruction due to large
student-to-teacher ratios, Intelligent Tutoring Systems offer a promising alternative by providing
tailored instruction to individual learners. This study investigates the impact of hints provided by
an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) on the learning of students. The learning of students can be
plotted in a learning curve which shows the relation between the number of attempts or training
opportunities and the number of errors while learning to evaluate the performance of the students.
Two groups are formed: one including students who requested hints and another including students
who did not request hints while solving the exercises. This division allows for a comparison of the
impact of hint utilization on the learning curves. The created learning curves have increasing error
rates with low R^2 scores, resulting in insufficient evidence to suggest that learning has occurred.
Several remarkable observations are provided to find differences in both groups. However, further
analyses are needed to support these findings.