Large-enrollment classes, such as general chemistry, tend to have online homework for students to interact and improve their content understanding. Ideally, these systems should be able to discern where and how students may be misunderstanding the problems and integrate more and improved feedback during the problem solving process. Work at Carnegie-Mellon University has been done to build an online homework system to integrate more feedback for the students into each step of a problem by expanding the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools system into the chemistry domain. Work with this system at Iowa State University has focused on student engagement with limiting reactant, equilibrium, and thermodynamic problems. This work delves into the stepwise process students take to achieve an answer. By tracking how students succeed or are mistaken in their reasoning insights, instruction about what areas to stress in the calculation can be gleaned. In addition to analyzing student work, think alouds and interviews have been conducted to determine the usefulness and benefits of students using these online tutors.

Analyzing student engagement and learning with an intelligent tutoring system

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.