Eliciting Intelligent Novice Behaviors With Grounded Feedback In A Fraction Addition Tutor

Standard intelligent tutoring systems give immediate feedback on whether students' answers are correct. This prevents unproductive floundering, but may also prevent students from engaging deeply with their misconceptions. This paper presents a prototype intelligent tutoring system with grounded feedback that supports students in evaluating and correcting their own errors. In a think-aloud study with five fifth-graders, students used the grounded feedback to self-correct, and solved more fraction addition problems with the tutor than with paper and pencil. These preliminary results are encouraging and motivate experimental work in this area.