Vincent Aleven
Location: (Pittsburgh, PA)
Personal Research Web Page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aleven
Keywords: intelligent tutoring systems, advanced learning technologies, authoring tools, educational games, metacognition, motivation
Posted on: Friday, June 5th, 2009
Broad Research Area: Computer Science Education / Educational Technology
Research Interests:
I am most excited by research projects that both tell us something new about how people learn and provide a better way of supporting learners. My research focuses on intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), broadly defined as automated software “tutors” that guide learners as they learn complex cognitive skills, and that use artificial intelligence to adapt instruction to the needs of individual learners. A practical goal of my research is to help make this technology broadly applicable and widespread.
To ensure the real-world relevance of my research, all my research projects involve evaluation of new ideas for learning technologies in real educational settings, although I am increasingly realizing the value of combining field research with laboratory studies. Roughly 40% of my research deals with Cognitive Tutors, a particular type of ITSs developed, perfected, and made classroom-ready in our research group at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and widely disseminated by Carnegie Learning Inc., a company founded by CMU for that purpose.
Much of my research takes place in the domain of high-school and middle-school mathematics, but my colleagues and I have also studied learning in ill-defined domains such as legal argumentation, causal reasoning, and intercultural competence, created new ITSs in these domains, and demonstrated that ITSs can be effective in ill-defined domains.
Three main foci of my research are: supporting meta-cognition in ITS, creating authoring tools to make the development of ITS dramatically easier, and enhancing motivation with educational technology.
My colleagues and I demonstrated empirically that students learn better when the tutor supports meta-cognition in the form of self-explanation; improvements developed in this research project were incorporated into Carnegie Learning’s Cognitive Tutor Geometry™, which is used daily in hundreds of US schools. In a different line of research, my colleagues and I have enhanced understanding of the role of on-demand help in learning with ITSs, showing that an automated tutor agent can lead to lasting improvement in student help seeking.
My colleagues and I created the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT), and created a new paradigm called “Example-tracing Tutors” such that non-programmers can create tutors 4 times faster than programmers used to create them, using programming-by-demonstration techniques. Tutors built with these tools are used in on-line courses offered at CMU (French, Chinese, and Chemistry), as supplement to a college-level genetics text, and in approximately 26 research studies in real educational settings. Currently, we are using CTAT to build a comprehensive open-access website for middle-school mathematics called Mathtutor (http://webmathtutor.org).
A novel direction in my research (and teaching) is educational games. Games and ITSs have complementary strengths. ITS have a proven track record in improving learning, games are very highly motivating. If these complementary strengths could be combined, the effect on learning would be highly dramatic. I am interested in studying how tight the integration between learning and game play needs to be in order to impact student learning.
Contact Information:
Vincent Aleven
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 - USA
Office: 3613 Newell Simon Hall
Phone: +1 (412) 268-5475
Email: email obfuscated - click to reveal
