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Development of an Intelligent Remedial Tutorial Learning System for Non-traditional and Advanced Placement Students

Abstract

Many four-year degree engineering technology schools have experienced problems in upper level student achievement and retention related to critical skills gaps legacies of non-traditional, advanced placement students such as two-year community college transfer students, formerly active military personnel, and other students matriculating from lower level courses with below average grades. While qualified to enroll in upper level courses by criteria such as individual course grade minimums met and minimum grade point averages achieved, many advanced placement students might not have been introduced to, or perhaps not mastered, specific critical skills necessary for success in upper level courses.

The consequences are several and can be severe: 1) faculty spend an inordinate amount of classroom and mentoring time in upper level courses on remedial rather than advanced skills development; 2) student achievement suffers as the cumulative effects of skills not mastered compounds; 3) retention rates of upper level students are negatively impacted.

This paper describes initial activities and results toward development of an innovative on-line, critical skills, intelligent remedial tutorial learning system intended to serve those students requiring extra-curricular learning support to enable their successful matriculation and retention in upper level courses. This founding work project was internally funded through a university Faculty Innovation Grant award.

Introduction

Many researchers have investigated the use of web based automated delivery of course content. Web-based training (WBT) and on-line distance education (ODE) systems are an outgrowth of at least two decades of computer-based training (CBT) and intelligent tutor systems (ITS) research and applications. In fact, web-based training (WBT) appears extensively in training programs for businesses, at universities, and in government agencies to provide training for employees in areas such as corporate policies, computer security, and administration processes.

These applications typically present the material in a linear instructional process with embedded periodic testing using multiple-choice questions to provide student assessment and outcome cores of the module. As often applied, this instructional approach can provide useful means for incremental augmentation of knowledge where the initial knowledge of the student is well known, perhaps through a pre-screening process, and the new concepts are likely to be easily understood by the students via a single presentation.

However, the interest here is specifically the situation where students have very different backgrounds and where any number of concepts might require explanation or immediate remedial learning including perhaps multiple perspectives. Students in this knowledge-deficit

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Walk, S., & Lawrence, R. (2010, June), Development Of An Intelligent Remedial Tutorial Learning System For Non Traditional And Advanced Placement Students Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16936