Students in AWE: changing their role from consumers to producers of ITS content Ivon Arroyo, Beverly P. Woolf Abstract. We describe an authoring environment for an intelligent tutoring system and report on its successful use by fifth grade students. This research places students in the role of content authors for ITS and supports them to share their creations and discuss their use, bringing both students and teachers into the tutoring system development loop. The potential of the idea of students as authors is great. It provides a way to reduce development costs and to facilitate a school’s adoption of ITS technology. It also provides a medium to pose word problems (and thus follow state-of-the-art educational theories) and integrate math, science and narrative. It is feasible and accomplishable, as students are willing and excited about doing it. It opens many other possibilities, such as providing a window to students' perceptions about student modeling and the misconceptions and cognitive processes underlying problem posing. The Internet-based authoring environment is titled Animalwatch Web-based Environment (AWE), and it supports creation of content for the Animalwatch mathematics Intelligent Tutoring System. 1. Introduction A major burden in the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems is content creation. A large amount of content is needed in an ITS to provide appropriate instruction, particularly because the system will individualizing tutoring for each student. If the pedagogical module concludes that a student would benefit from a problem of a specific difficulty level, then such problem should be available to the student. This is one major cost of having an adaptive system. If the system has run out of problems of that kind, then the benefits of intelligence in ITS are diminished. Authoring tools have been developed as a way to reduce costs in intelligent tutoring system development. Murray [00] classifies authoring tools into several categories, including generic, which allow for the creation of tutoring systems in any domains, and specific, which allow for the expansion of a specific and existing system into a related domain. Many different people may author content with specific authoring tools, that is to produce content to enhance an existing system. Should the authors be system designers, domain experts, or the end users? Ritter[98] presents an authoring tool called pSAT to create problem sets for the PAT Algebra Tutor. The authoring tool is aimed for teachers. Thus, pSAT is an attempt to encourage a division of labor in the development of ITS, as authoring can be done by those in daily contact with the student. Having teachers author content seems promising, as it supports teacher "adoption" of ITS. Bondaryk [98] talks about this as "the adoption process of media materials," which requires instructors to be aware of and willing and able to use them. Because computer tutoring involves mainly the student and the computer, teachers tend to be out of the loop. It is important that teachers feel comfortable with ITS and appreciate them as tools that will help them with teaching. Otherwise, teachers will not feel like using them in the classroom. Thus, having teachers author content seems appropriate. The main disadvantage of this approach is that teachers are extremely busy people, and the authoring process implies putting another burden on them instead of easing their load. This is enough to prevent teachers from using such content authoring tools, even if they think they would like to do it. Instead of having teachers become content authors, we propose to have students create word problems with the guidance of a teacher. After all, problem posing is of central importance in the discipline of mathematics and in the nature of mathematical thinking. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics of the United States has recently called for an increased emphasis on problem-posing activities in the classroom, encouraging teachers to "formulate problems from situations within and outside of mathematics" [NCTM standards, 1991]. Some experts say that problem solving consists of successive reformulation of an initial problem [Polya, 54], so both posing and answering are important parts of the problem-solving process. As a result, teachers encourage K-12 students to pose word problems, claiming improvements in students' problem solving as a whole [Larkin, 86]. Because of the recent appearance of such methods, little is known