Accepted for User Modelling and User-Adapted Interaction. Mitrovic, A., Mayo, M., Suraweera, P and Martin, B. 2001. I have proposed and demonstrated a methodology for building robust, intelligent systems. The Bayesian network is used to predict the student behaviour. Decision problems such as next problem selection are defined as decision-theoretic utility functions.
Decision theory is used to select the next tutorial action.
What it does is isolate the source of the erroneous behaviour to the specification of the Bayesian network or utility function. The ITS designer does not need to consider the procedure for selecting the tutorial actions because they are optimal. ITS can be caused by any component of the system. My research has shown that these result in a greater rate of learning than an ad-hoc strategy. This research has demonstrated that use of decision theory in ITSs is tractable.