Dynamic instructional planning for an intelligent physiology tutoring system

An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that will assist first-year medical students in learning the causal relationships between the parameters of the circulatory system and in solving problems of disturbances to the system is discussed. The central component of the ITS, the instructional planner, is responsible for determining what to do next at each point during a tutoring session. The approach taken is to build the planner by combining the capabilities of lesson planning and discourse planning in order to provide globally coherent and adaptive instruction. The planner consists of two parts: a lesson planner and a discourse planner. The lesson planner generates lesson plans, which the discourse planner carries out. A sample dialogue, extracted from the transcript of an actual human tutor-student interaction, is used to provide a framework for the development of the overall system, especially from the planner´s point of view