Pitt Researchers Developing Computers That Teach Like Humans

PITTSBURGH—While new federal education rules emphasizing testing and standards have fueled a tutoring boom, relatively few pupils enjoy access to effective but costly one-on-one teaching. In an effort to spread the intellectual wealth, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh's Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) are working to bring individual instruction to all students.

With $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF), principal investigator (PI) Kurt VanLehn, a Pitt computer science professor and LRDC senior scientist, is working to build less expensive computer tutors as good as their more expensive human counterparts. Looking specifically at the best ways to teach and learn physics, VanLehn and his colleagues are probing both tutor and student behavior.

"The computer tutors available in stores today just tell you if your answer is right or wrong," VanLehn said. "With a human tutor, though, students can do much more," including discussing their reading with the tutor and getting help solving longer, more complex problems.

A major difference between human and computer tutors has been that only human tutors understand unconstrained natural language—the conversational, open-ended give-and-take that can often flummox the smartest software.

Today, commercial educational technology involves two response formats: multiple choice and mathematical formulas. If all goes as planned, a tutoring program should be on the market in five to 10 years that can handle open-ended questions and analyze the students' text or speech responses.

The LRDC team's basic approach to improving computer tutoring is to simply study and learn from interactions between humans and computer tutors. As more effective dialogue strategies are identified, they will be incorporated into a natural language-based tutoring system.

LRDC's new tutoring venture builds on a recently completed five-year, $5 million NSF-funded Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Constructive Learning Environments, led by VanLehn. The center developed several prototypes of natural language tutoring systems both at LRDC and at Carnegie Mellon University. The center also developed tools for building more such tutors.

Capitalizing on LRDC's ability to attract and link researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, the computer tutor study includes researchers specializing in the cognitive psychology of human tutoring, the technology of natural language processing, and the design of effective tutoring systems.

The Co-PIs are Diane J. Litman, a Pitt computer science professor and LRDC research scientist; Michelene Chi, a Pitt psychology professor and LRDC senior scientist; Pamela W. Jordan, a LRDC research associate; and Carolyn P. Rose, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon.

The group's grant is administered under NSF's Information Technology Research program, which supports innovative multidisciplinary research that extends the frontiers of information technology, leads to new and unanticipated technologies, creates revolutionary applications, or provides alternative approaches to complete important activities.

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