The Principles of Designing an Expert System in Teaching Mathematics

Abstract

This study reveals general didactic concepts of the Expert Systems (ES) development process in the educational area. The proof of concept is based on the example of teaching the 8th grade Algebra subject. The main contribution in this work is the implementation of innovative approaches in analysis and processing of data by expert system as well as the development of the step-by-step algorithm to build a table of dependencies between subjects in a course, known as Concept-Effect Relationship (CER) model, which is introduced in this research work. The CER model is the core component of the ES, based on which the system builds the individual educational strategy for a pupil. The problem of building a table of dependencies between subjects in a course has been a significant obstacle when using this approach in real life due to its time complexity and a demand for significant efforts from multiple experts. Our novel approach introduces a general algorithm for building a dependency table with no linking to a specific subject, thus making CER model implementation easier in real-life educational practice.