2010-03-11: Congratulations! Dimitra Tsovaltzi successfully defended her PhD thesis.

ActiveMath member Dimitra Tsovaltzi successfully defended her PhD thesis titled "Menon: Automating a Socratic Teaching Model for Mathematical Proofs," which was supervised by Prof. Dr. Jörg Siekmann (Saarland University, Computer Science) and reviewed by Prof. Dr. Roland Brünken (Saarland University, Educational Science), Dr. Bruce M. McLaren (Carnegie Mellon University), and Dr. Collin Matheson (University of Edinburgh).

Thesis abstract: We present an approach to adaptive pedagogical feedback for arbitrary domains as an alternative to resource-intensive pre-compiled feedback, which represents the state-of-the-art in intelligent tutoring systems. A consequence of automatic adaptive pedagogical feedback is that the number of tasks with feedback that can be offered to students for practice increases. We focus on automating different aspects of teaching that together are primarily responsible for learning and can be integrated in a unified natural-language output. The automatic production and natural-language dialogue generation of feedback enables its personalisation both at the pedagogical and the dialogue level. We propose a method for automating the production of domain-independent adaptive feedback. The proof-of-concept implementation of the tutorial manager Menon implements a Socratic teaching strategy for the domain of set-theory proofs.

posted by Oliver at Mar 15, 2010 12:43 PM