Tutoring

The idea of directly teaching students "how to think" goes back at least to Polya (1957), if not to Socrates, but it reached a new stage of development in Papert's laboratory (Papert, 1970). In the LOGO lab, young students were taught AI concepts such as hierarchical decomposition, opening up a new dimension by which they could take apart a problem and reason about its solution. In part, Polya's heuristics have seemed vague and too general, too hard to follow in real problems (Newell, 1983). But progress in AI programming, particularly expert system design, has suggested a vocabulary of structural concepts that we now see must be conveyed along with the heuristics to make them intelligible (see Chapter 29). Developing in parallel with Papert's educational experiments and capitalizing even more directly on AI technology, programs called intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) were constructed in the 1970s.