Teaching Database Design with Constraint-Based Tutors

Abstract

Abstract:Design tasks are difficult to teach, due to large, unstructured solution spaces, underspecified problems, non-existent problem solving algorithms and stopping criteria. In this paper, we comment on our approach to develop KERMIT, a constraintbased tutor that taught database design. In later work, we re-implemented KERMIT as EER-Tutor, and extended its instructional domain. Several evaluation studies performed with KERMIT and EER-Tutor show that they are effective Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). We also comment on various extensions made to EER-Tutor over the years. There are several contributions of our research, such as developing effective problem-solving support for conceptual database design in terms of interface design. Our database design tutors deal with huge solution spaces efficiently by specifying constraints that capture equivalent solution states, and using ideal solutions to capture the semantics of the problem. Instead of requiring a problem solver, the ITS checks whether the student's database schema is correct by matching it to constraints and the ideal solution. Another contribution of our work is in guidelines for developing effective feedback to the student. We have revised our paper further to respond to the comments we received from the reviewers. We thank you and the reviewers on the efforts to improve the paper. Please find our replies below.Reviewer #1: This paper provides a useful references for IJAIED readers to examine the authors's series of researches. I think it satisfies the requests as a short commentary.If there is room to add pages, I hope the authors add more detailed explanation concerning the difficulty of the "ER modeling". This explanation is helpful to understand the motivation, approach and contributions of the series of the researches more Powered by Editorial Manager® and ProduXion Manager® from Aries Systems Corporationdeeply.Reply: We have expanded the introduction, and the section on KERMIT to address this comment, as well as the related comments of Reviewer 4.Supplemental explanations to each interface would be also helpful for readers.Reply: We have added more text to discuss the interfaces shown, and also separated Figure 2 into two figures.Typo -There is an extra parenthesis on page 4, line 45.-There is a sentence expressed with different font size on page 5, line 41.-"Educaiont" on page 11, line 17.Reply: All of these changes have been done. Reply: The previous version of the paper stated that the effect size was based on gains. We have now expanded that part, to say "learning gains" and we added an explanation "(post-test score -pre-test score)". Reviewer #4: This is a nice paper and will make a good addition to the IJAIED special issue. However, it would be helpful to succinctly formulate a small number of key contributions of the work and include them in the abstract and discussion section.Reply: done Also, I would really like to get a better sense for how the particular type of illdefinedness that exists in this domain (no clearly defined proce...

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“…The need for better feedback and more engaging tools is tackled by Mitrovic and Suraweera who propose KERMIT [28], a constraint-based tutor that teaches database design. KERMIT was applied as an EER-Tutor and provides an Intelligent Tutoring Systems which checked whether the students' database scheme was correct by matching it with the ideal constraints and solutions and providing effective feedback to students.…”