CAPIT: an Intelligent Tutoring System for Capitalisation and Punctuation

Overview of CAPIT

CAPIT is a Capitalisation And Punctuation Intelligent Tutor designed for the 10-11-year-old age group. CAPIT teaches a subset of the basic rules of English capitalisation and punctuation.

The system presents the completion exercises to students. The interface of the system is illustrated here:

CAPIT is based on Constraint-Based Modeling (CBM), a student modeling approach proposed by Stellan Ohlsson. It is a very efficient approach that concentrates on the violations of the basic principles in the domain of instruction.

Currently, there are 25 constraints and 45 problems in the system. The system's architecture is illustrated in the following figure:

To adapt to individual students, CAPIT maintains a model for each student. A student model contains information about the history of previous sessions (like a list of problems solved correctly etc) and also contains a model of the student's knowledge, expressed in terms of constraints.

CAPIT was evaluated in two elementary schools in Christchurch (Westburn and Ilam schools) in 2000.

For the results of these evaluations, see the published papers.