Teaching strategies in the classroom

For an ITS to be used in the classroom, it must take on the role of assistant to the teacher. Further what teachers predominantly need from an assistant is configurability at every knowledge level. This has led to considering knowledge at the domain level, the strategy level, and the meta-strategy level and allowing teachers to edit all three. In order to avoid some of the efficiency pitfalls inherent in this approach, the authors propose to decompose a teaching strategy in a number of more elementary heuristics and to allow teachers to change the individual elements without changing the way in which these elements are combined. The elements are: the teaching/testing decision; difficulty after the last response; initiative level and content. A first prototype has been built which is being evaluated by teachers