Office of Naval Research STEM Grand Challenge - Adaptive, Generalizable Intelligent Tutors for STEM and Naval Training and Education

The proposed topic will lead to new approaches for building adaptive and individualized intelligent tutors for STEM training and education that are able to: -Increase comprehension of instructional content over a fixed teaching duration and curriculum -Train to higher standards of competence (e.g., expertise), not simply enabling better recall -Accelerate the development of problem solving, reasoning, and decision-making skills The program will pursue a wide variety of approaches that address six issues that are key to developing the next generation of intelligent tutoring systems for STEM applications: 1) Designing computational cognitive models of student performance; 2) Enabling realistic and effective student - intelligent tutor interactions; 3) Creating individually-tailored instructional strategies for delivering a large corpus of course material; 4) Generalizing the underlying technologies to multiple educational domains and populations; 5) Using the most current empirical research on the science of learning pedagogical approaches ( e.g. self-explanation); and 6) Designing tools for reducing the time and expertise needed to build these tutors. White Papers are required prior to submitting a Full Proposal.