Student Modeling in an Intelligent Tutoring System

Student modeling and cognitively diagnostic assessment are important issues that need to be addressed for the development and successful application of intelligent tutoring systems (its). Its needs the construction of complex models to represent the skills that students are using and their knowledge states, and practitioners want cognitively diagnostic information at a finer grained level. This chapter reviews our effort on modeling student’s knowledge in the ASSISTment project. Intelligent tutors have been mainly used to teach students. In the ASSISTment project, we have emphasized using the intelligent tutoring system as an assessment system that provides instructional assistance during the test. Usually it is believed that assessment get harder if students are allowed to learn during the test, as its then like try to hit a moving target. So our results are surprising that by providing tutoring to students while they are assessed we actually prove the assessment of students’ knowledge. Additionally, in this article, we present encouraging results about a fine-grained skill model with that system that is able to predict state test scores. We conclude that using intelligent tutoring systems to do assessment seems like a reasonable way of dealing with the dilemma that every minute spent testing students takes time away from instruction.