Abstract:

This paper introduces a research study of the development and application of the Expert System (ES) in the educational area in Russia. The use of ES in education can simplify the process of teaching subjects. The proper use of the system can significantly reduce the workload of a teacher and leave more time for self-development and improving professional mathematical competence. The ES is built on the Concept-Effect Relationship (CER) model, which represents prerequisite relationships among concepts in a course, in our case, mathematics. The enhanced CER model introduced in this work provides optimal application in real life practice by introducing a general methodology for building dependency tables between topics in a course without linking to a specific subject. The effectiveness of this model heavily depends on the concept relationship knowledge provided by the domain experts (e.g. experienced subject-teachers). The authors of the 8th grade Algebra course books, approved by the Ministry of Education of Russia as the recommended books, represent the domain experts. The ES generates individual exercises for each student based on his/her academic performance which are collected from the didactic materials for the 8th grade students of Algebra course and integrated into the system.

The system is developed by using the Java programming language, with the rule-based Java Expert System Shell as the expert system core, which is used to perform expert analysis and provide recommendations to teachers.
The pilot implementation of the system is held in one of the multilingual high schools of Kazan (Russia). The preliminary results of the system’s usage demonstrate its effectiveness in terms of optimization of teachers’ time management without loss of students’ academic literacy.

Keywords:

Expert systems, teaching, mathematics, education, multilingualism, information systems in education.