Knowledge-based adaptive curriculum sequencing for CAI

One aspect of tutoring skill for technical subjects is individualized, adaptive sequencing of the problems given to students as learning exercises. A Curriculum Information Network (CIN) describes the relationships between the problems in a CAI curriculum and the concepts and skills that they are intended to teach. It is a basis for selecting problems for each student with respect to his evolving knowledge of those concepts and skills. This paper describes the application of a semantic network to represent the complex interrelationships among the skills in a CIN for the BASIC Instructional Program, a CAI problem-solving laboratory for introductory programming in the BASIC language. The semantic network is used in drawing complex inferences about the student's state of knowledge and the problems that are appropriate to present to him. Such inferences enable more skillful problem sequencing by the CAI system.