Educational Research and Theory Perspectives on Intelligent Computer-Assisted Instruction.

This paper defines the next generation of intelligent computer-assisted instructional systems (ICAI) by depicting the elaborations and extensions offered by educational research and theory perspectives to enhance the ICAI environment. The first section describes conventional ICAI systems, which use expert systems methods and have three modules: a knowledge base, a student model, and a tutor model. The second section discusses the ICAI system of the future--a system that elaborates and extends the three basic modules of the conventional ICAI system--and explains how the future system will integrate artificial intelligence (AI) tools and methods with instructional variables and conditions empirically tested and shown to improve learning. It is concluded that the next generation ICAI will use a comprehensive meta-learning model which would take individual differences into account in the assessment and diagnosis processes, and make reference to both the learner's acquisition (i.e., storage) and retrieval of knowledge; it will select the strategies of instruction from a rich base of instructional variables according to learning objectives and the structure of the information to be learned; and it will use the concepts of artificial intelligence in the form of heuristics that have the capacity to learn and to adjust according to given situations. Some examples of major advantages that may result from the use of the next generation ICAI system conclude the paper. (18 references) (CGD)