Teaching an Agent to Test Students

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative application of the Disciple Learning Agent Shell to the building of an educational agent that generates history tests for middle school students, to assist in the assessment of their understanding and use of higher-order thinking skills. Disciple is an apprenticeship, multistrategy learning agent that can be taught by an expert how to perform domain-specific tasks in a way that resembles the way an apprentice would be taught by the expert. Disciple has been taught by an educator to generate and answer basic test questions and to explain the answers. From its interaction with the educational expert, Disciple has learned general rules that allow it to generate a large number of new test questions for students, together with hints, answers, and explanations of the answers. As a result, it can guide the students during their practice of higher-order thinking skills as they would be directly guided by the educator. The Disciple agent is also a useful tool f...