GTE - AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL APPROACH TO INSTRUCTIONAL MODELING

The instructional competence of an Intelligent Tutoring System lies in its instructional model. Such a model has been approached in the ITS field from a theoretical and from a computational point of view. GTE a pproaches the instructional model from an epistemological point of vie w by making it reflect the instructional knowledge and expertise that underlies human teaching. The underlying assumption is that such knowl edge and expertise has a generic nature, and that it can be modelled. The central component of the GTE architecture is therefore a large gen eric instructional knowledge base that is capable of dynamically gener ating a huge variety of instructional plans. It enables to flexibly ad apt the teaching performance to the requirements of the individual tea ching context. In this paper we describe the formalism that was develo ped for the representation of the instructional knowledge, the interpr etation engine that can generate instructional processes based on the knowledge in the knowledge base, and the actual content of the knowled ge base. It illustrates the feasibility of the assumption that was mad e, and the impact this may have on authoring instructional strategies.