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We describe the current version of the Why System, a script-based socratic tutor which uses tutoring strategies formulated as production rules. The current system is capable of carrying on a dialogue about the factors influencing rainfall by presenting different cases to the student, asking for predictions, probing for relevent factors, entrapping the student when he has not identified all necessary factors, and presenting counterexamples. The current system is incomplete because it lacks a goal structure to guide the tutorial sessions. We outline a more complete theory of the goal structure of Socratic tutors based on analysis of human tutorial dialogues. There are two top level goals: (1) refinement of the student's causal model and (2) refinement of the student's predictive abilities. The subgoals are diagnosis of bugs in the student's knowledge and correction of the bugs. This goal-driven control mechanism governs the selection of examples and teaching strategies used by the tutor.
Stevens et al. (Sat,) studied this question.