The paper describes a biology tutoring system with adaptive question selection. Questions were selected for presentation to the student based on their utilities, which were estimated from the chance that the student's competence would increase if the questions were asked. Competence was represented by the probability of mastery of a set of biology…

It is often assumed that engaging in a one-on-one dialogue with a tutor is more effective than listening to a lecture or reading a text. Although earlier experiments have not always supported this hypothesis, this may be due in part to allowing the tutors to cover different content than the noninteractive instruction. In 7 experiments, we tested…