Seite - 227 - in Intelligent Environments 2019 - Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

Developing “Smart” Tutorial Tools to Assist Students Learn Calculus, Taking Account of Their Changing Preferred Approaches to Learning Mastaneh DAVIS a,1 , Gordon HUNTER a,1 , Lynn THALAAL a , Vivien TRAN BA b and Alice WOODING-OLAJORIN a a Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing, Kingston University, London, KT1 2EE, U.K b École Nationale Supérieure d’Ingénieurs de Caen (ENSI-Caen), Caen, France Abstract. We present the result of a small study where we investigate what types of resources current students of Mathematics and Mathematics for Engineering prefer for assisting them with their studies of those topics. We found that modern students seem to have a clear preference for on-line resources over traditional textbooks. However, there is currently a lack of good quality resources of that type which allow students to carry-out conventional mathematics exercises on-line and still get appropriate, meaningful and informative feedback on their answers. We then describe our efforts towards addressing this problem through the development of an “intelligent” tutorial system for Calculus which provides feedback tailored to the student’s responses, noting where and how they have made common errors. Keywords. Learning Technology, Intelligent Tutorial System, Student Preferences, Calculus, Mathematics, Technology Enhanced Learning 1. Introduction Acquiring at least an intermediate level of proficiency in Mathematics is a necessity for success in most Science and Technology disciplines, and many of these require knowledge of and skills in differential and integral calculus. However, many students – particularly those from non-traditional backgrounds, and students with disabilities or other special needs - find these topics difficult [9, 10], but time and resources to provide face to face tutorial support for them are often very limited. In the past, some text-based resources such as "programmed learning" books have provided step-by-step guidance for students wanting to work through example problems in private study. However, by surveying a substantial cohort of current Engineering and Mathematics degree students, we have found that modern students appear to have a marked preference for web-based resources over traditional textbooks. Although many tutorial websites for Calculus topics do exist, many of these are rather limited in the ways in which they enable students to test themselves on their progress in mastering the relevant skills and techniques. Most such websites only offer multiple choice or short (usually numerical) answer questions. There is a need for self-test resources which allow students to enter their answers in an algebraic format of input, to have these answers checked both against the correct answer and for "common mistakes", and for feedback to be given which is both relevant to the student's answer 1 Corresponding Authors; E-mail: mast@kingston.ac.uk ; G.Hunter@kingston.ac.uk Intelligent Environments 2019 A. Muñoz et al. (Eds.) © 2019 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/AISE190048 227