Evolution of the Concept Map Based Adaptive Knowledge Assessment System: Implementation and Evaluation ResultsThe paper represents the concept map based adaptive knowledge assessment system. Advantages of concept maps are analyzed emphasizing that the approach offers a reasonable balance between requirements to assess higher levels of knowledge according to Bloom's taxonomy and complexity of a system. Concept maps allow revealing of student's knowledge structure, promote system thinking and support process oriented learning where a study course is divided into stages in each of which knowledge assessment is carried out. The developed knowledge assessment system consists from a teacher's, learner's and administrator's modules and is implemented as a multiagent system. Four prototypes of the system developed within four projects are described. The first prototype supports only fill-in-the-map tasks where a learner must put given concepts in correct places. The second prototype provides changing the degree of task difficulty, thus, performing adaptation to a learner's knowledge level. The set of tasks are also extended by construct-the-map tasks. Improvements implemented in the third prototype allow using of directed arcs and standard relationships in concept maps. The three-tier architecture used in the fourth prototype is chosen to rise the security level of the system. Besides that learner's support is considerably expanded giving help and tutoring to a learner. Results of evaluation of the developed system's prototypes in different study courses are presented. The paper concludes with the comparison of all four prototypes using all main characteristics of the developed knowledge assessment system.

The paper focuses on the issues of providing an adaptive support for learners in intelligent tutoring systems when learners solve practical problems. The results of the analysis of support policies of learners in the existing intelligent tutoring systems are given and the revealed problems are emphasized. The concept and the architectural parts of an intelligent tutoring system are defined. The approach which provides greater adaptive abilities of systems of such kind offering two modes of problem-solving and using a two-layer model of hints is described. It is being implemented in the intelligent tutoring system for the Minimax algorithm at present. In accordance with the proposed approach the learner solves problems in the mode which is the most appropriate for him/her and receives the most suitable hint.

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The paper is devoted to the knowledge assessment system that has been developed at the Department of Systems Theory and Design of Riga Technical University for the last four years. The system is based on concept maps that allow displaying the knowledge structure of a particular learner in the form of a graph. Teacher's created concept maps serve as a standard against which learner's concept maps are compared. However, it is not correct to compare teacher's and learners' concept maps by examining the exact equivalence of relationships in both maps, because people construct knowledge in different ways. Thus, an appropriate mechanism is needed for the flexible evaluation of learners' concept maps. The paper describes the algorithm implemented in the concept map based knowledge assessment system and its evolution through four prototypes of the system.

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