Pedagogical framework for an engineering intelligent tutoring system

Computers provide potential instructional platforms to enhance education and training for engineering students and professionals. Significant advantages of computerized instruction are its unlimited accessibility and its ability to deliver individualized instruction. However, the major drawbacks of developing computerized instructional system such as ITS are the high developing cost and time and the lack of adequate underlying pedagogy.;ITS-Engineering is a domain-independent tutoring shell for developing ITS applications within the scope of engineering domains with significantly less time and cost. The pedagogical principles of ITS-Engineering are based on the widely accepted Gagne instructional design. Gagne's instructional design consists of two major elements: learning outcomes and instructional events. Designing instruction in Gagne includes composing learning activities for each instructional event to achieve a desired learning outcome.;ITS-Engineering is additionally equipped with a multiple teaching style mechanism to deliver instruction that is truly adapted to student's evolving learning situations. There are four teaching styles available in ITS-Engineering. They are instructor-oriented, guided discovery, user-initiated and exploratory. These teaching styles are implemented within three learning sessions: browsing session, practicing session and tutoring session.;Two ITS applications are developed within the framework of ITS-Engineering: ITS-CPM and ITS-Shear. ITS-CPM is an ITS for instructing construction planning and scheduling techniques. The scope of ITS-Shear's domain includes shear analysis of reinforced concrete beam.;The evaluation of ITS-Engineering, ITS-CPM and ITS-Shear indicates usefulness of the systems to enhance engineering education. The pedagogy of the systems can also be extended to apply to other learning environments such as a traditional classroom. The results from the shell evaluation demonstrate the capability of ITS-Engineering to develop different ITS applications with significant time and cost savings.;ITS-Engineering, ITS-CPM and ITS-Shear are implemented using NASA's CLIPS 6.0 with the enhancement from STK (Scheme TK) on a Unix Sparc station.