The Conceptual Helper: An Intelligent Tutoring System for Teaching Fundamental Physics Concepts

This paper describes an intelligent tutoring system designed to help students solve physics problems of a qualitative nature. The tutor uses a unique cognitive based approach to teaching physics, which presents innovations in three areas. 1) The teaching strategy, which focuses on teaching links among the concepts of the domain that are essential for conceptual understanding yet are seldom learned by the students. 2) The manner in which the knowledge is taught, which is based on a combination of effective human tutoring techniques, successful pedagogical methods, and less cognitively demanding approaches. 3) The way in which misconceptions are handled. The tutor was implemented using the model-tracing paradigm and uses probabilistic assessment to guide the remediation. Some preliminary results of the evaluation of the system are also presented.