Electronic Homework

The Electronic Homework assistant system is composed of two components: the Computer Tutor and the Homework Administrator. The Computer Tutor is an intelligent tutoring system that can provide personal assistance like supplying hints, checking errors, providing remediation and prioritizing problems. The Homework Administrator is a teacher's assistant in assigning and marking the homework, and summarizing errors for teachers' reference. Both components of Electronic Homework are composed of several modules. Different types of knowledge, mainly obtained from human experts, are incorporated into the Computer Tutor, and the pieces of knowledge, in the form of rules, are stored in the following separate modules: the expert module, which contains the knowledge that the system imparts to the student; the student module, which stores the knowledge of the students, both correct and incorrect, in the form of rules; the tutoring module, which contains the knowledge on how and when to help students correct their errors; and the communication module, which deals with the interaction between the user and the computer tutor. The Homework Administrator is responsible for handling routines normally done by teachers, which include ordering problems, collecting students' errors and marking students' work. The effect of using Electronic Homework was investigated among students of different academic abilities; in one school, students using the system performed better on less abstract problems. A major shortcoming of Electronic Homework is that it reacts very slowly in some situations. (Contains 17 references.) (AEF)