VALIDATION OF KNOWLEDGE BASED TUTORING SYSTEM DEVELOPED FOR TEACHING BASIC ENGINEERING DRAWING CONCEPTS

Every group of learners is essentially heterogeneous with significant differences in their learning styles and preferences. Driven by the vast avenues thrown open by the technological innovations, strategy as well as technology of education are undergoing a sea change. These changes have given a fillip to the efforts to focus teaching to the requirements of individual learners using flexible approaches which cut across barriers of space, time, materials and media. Knowledge Based Tutoring System (KBTS) is a system aimed at customizing the learning experiences to suit the needs and learning preferences of the individual learners. Teaching learning is a complex process involving different entities. These entities are represented by different components of the KBTS. “Domain Knowledge Component” represents the Content area while “Student component” models the actual learner whereas “Pedagogy component” and “Control component” represent the strategy followed in the teaching learning process. “Engineering Drawing”, popularly known as the “language of engineers” is a course offered in the first year of various Engineering Undergraduate Degree programs. Engineering drawing is the science of representing the real world objects which are in 3D through different views on paper which is essentially 2D. Such a representation requires a high level ability of visualizing the object in various orientations and positions. The paper discusses an approach adopted for developing a Knowledge Based Tutoring System for teaching the basic concepts of engineering drawing and validating it by adopting a single group pretest posttest experimental design. The analysis is presented using adopting appropriate statistical techniques