Effectiveness of Incorporating Mathematical Augmentation in Intelligent Dialogue-Based Tutoring System
HueyMin Wu, ChungLin Lee, and PeiChen Wu
Mathematical augmentation is the foundation and essence of
mathematics education. Mathematical argumentation can not
only promote deep mathematical understanding, but also learn to
connect some abstract ideas in a logical way (Kuhn, 2005;
Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2008). Although
argumentation is an important skill, it is not an innately
possessed or can be easily acquired skill. Research showed that
the performance of the argument is not good for most people
(Hahn, Harris & Oaksford, 2012). Mathematical argumentation
is often conducted in the classroom through group discussions
(Osborne, 2010). Teachers with the professional skills in
augmentation could guide students to carry out effective
mathematical augmentation. However most teachers don’t know
how to implement argumentation teaching in mathematics class
(Lin, 2018). Most students in classes are in the middle ability, a
small number of students have high or low ability, and it is
difficult to group students heterogeneously. Mathematical
conjecturing has a power of construing a series of connected
mathematics properties or mathematics concepts as an approach
to enhancing mathematical argumentation. In this research, the
mathematical conjecturing instruction is guided by a tutor agent
in the intelligent dialogue-based tutoring system. According to
students' abilities, different types of peer agents are used to solve
the problem of grouping students heterogeneously in traditional
classroom. The effectiveness of incorporating mathematical
augmentation in intelligent dialogue-based tutoring system is
explored in this study. The questions addressed in this study are:
1) Is the learning gains of incorporating mathematical
augmentation in intelligent dialogue-based tutoring system more
effective than that of traditional group based instruction? 2) Is
the learning gains in mathematical conjecturing of the
experiment group more effective than that of the control group?