Personalized Learning in Engineering: Validation of an Intelligent Tutoring System
摘要
The role of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) in engineering education has gained relevance because of their ability to personalize learning. Despite these theoretical benefits, practical validation of these systems in real educational environments remains limited. This study examined the implementation and validation of the Adaptive Intelligent Engineering Digital Tutor (AIDET) in an electronics course at a university in the Dominican Republic. This study aimed to validate the effectiveness of the AIDET system by comparing the performance of two groups of students: an experimental group that used the AIDET and a control group that received traditional instruction from a professor. The purpose was to measure the impact of ITS on student learning, specifically in terms of participation, retention, and mastery of complex electronic concepts. The questions that guided the study were as follows: Does the use of ITS significantly improve learning outcomes compared to traditional teaching methods? Does the implementation of the AIDET meet the minimum learning standards for an engineering course at a university? The study involved 22 students divided into two groups: an experimental group of 11 students who used the AIDET interactive learning system, and a control group of 11 students who received traditional instruction. Both groups were assessed simultaneously using two identical examinations to obtain the final grade. The average grade in the control group was 59.22 and in the other group it was 60.45. A nonparametric Mann–Whitney U test was performed to validate the results using a nonparametric approach, which indicated that there were no statistically significant differences between the groups (U = 98.5, p = 0.648). This observation suggests that nonconventional teaching methods can play a relevant role in the learning process of complex subjects. Although both groups had a similar final average performance, the experimental group had a slightly higher performance in the final grade.