Abstract:

EER-Tutor is a mature Intelligent Tutoring System that teaches conceptual database design using the Entity Relationship model. The system has been in regular use in a relational database course at the University of Canterbury since 2002. We assume that the student has acquired some knowledge of conceptual database design from lectures and labs, and therefore the system does not provide direct instruction. Instead, EER-Tutor contains more than 50 problems for students to solve. The system analyzes students' solutions and provide feedback. Previous studies have shown that practice with EER-Tutor results in significant increase in performance compared to the the classroom condition.

In this paper we investigate how much the class of 2018 used EER-Tutor in preparation for their assignment and final exam. Besides tutored problem solving, EER-Tutor provide a mode in which students can draw any database schema using the system's graphical editor, in which case they do not receive any feedback from the system. All but one student used this mode to develop their assignment solutions. We found that over 75% of students used EER-Tutor for tutored problem solving. Furthermore, those students who completed at least five problems achieved significantly higher results on the assignment and exam. We conducted regression analysis which show that the number of sessions and the number of solved problems are significant predictors of the assignment and exam scores. Given the benefits of tutored problem solving, we propose some modifications to the course.

Keywords:

Intelligent tutoring system, voluntary use, effect on student learning.