Fitting spatial ability and free-formed questions into Intelligent Tutoring Systems development

Building effective learning tools is an art that can only be perfected by a great deal of explorations involving the tools' audience: the learners. This paper focuses on accounting for the learners' spatial ability as well as providing an additional help channel in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. We modified ERMTutor, a constraint-based tutor that teaches logical database design, to provide not only textual feedback messages, but also messages containing combinations of text and pictures, in accordance with the multimedia theory of learning [1]. We also added a question-asking module which enables students to ask freeform questions. Results of preliminary studies performed show a promising indication for further explorations. We plan to use these results as the basis for another evaluation study in early 2007.