Issues in computerizing the inquiry dialogue planning process

The TAP (Tutoring Agenda Planner) project studies the feasibility of implementing the inquiry teaching method of Collins & Stevens [4] as an ITS shell. Inquiry teaching is a case- as well as dialogue-based teaching style. It has the objective of training scientific reasoning skills while at the same time can be used to teach subject domain knowledge. Collins and Stevens [5] proposed four sets of rules for the delivery of inquiry dialogue. This paper reports on the tackling of some of the major issues that arise in our effort to computerize the rules, particularly in the following aspects: (1) the reorganization of the rules; (2) the role of case selection in the rule selection process. Copyright © 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.