Intelligent tutoring system for clinical reasoning skill acquisition in dental students.

Full Abstract

Learning clinical reasoning is an important core activity of the modern dental curriculum. This article describes an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) for clinical reasoning skill acquisition. The system is designed to provide an experience that emulates that of live human-tutored problem-based learning (PBL) sessions as much as possible, while at the same time permitting the students to participate collaboratively from disparate locations. The system uses Bayesian networks to model individual student knowledge and activity, as well as that of the group. Tutoring algorithms use the models to generate tutoring hints. The system incorporates a multimodal interface that integrates text and graphics so as to provide a rich communication channel between the students and the system, as well as among students in the group. Comparison of learning outcomes shows that student clinical reasoning gains from the ITS are similar to those obtained from human-tutored sessions.

Author information

Author/s: Suebnukarn, Siriwan (S);

Affiliation: Thammasat University Dental School, Pathumthani, Thailand. ssiriwan(-atsign-)tu.ac.th

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article

Journal: Journal of dental education (J Dent Educ), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Oct; vol 73 (issue 10) : pp 1178-86

Dates: Created 2009/10/06; Completed 2009/10/19;

PMID: 19805782, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 10/19/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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