A. Peña-Ayala (Ed.): Intelligent and Adaptive ELS, SIST 17, pp. 183–212. springerlink.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 Chapter 8 PCMAT – Mathematics Collaborative Educational System Constantino Martins 1 , Luiz Faria 1 , Marta Fernandes 1 , Paulo Couto 1 , Cristina Bastos 1 , and Eurico Carrapatoso 2 1 GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group / Institute of Engineering – Polytechnic of Porto R. Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal {acm,lef,mmaf,pjco}@isep.ipp.pt, cristinabastos70@gmail.com 2 Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto R. Dr. Roberto Frias 4200-465 Porto, Portugal emc@fe.up.pt Abstract. PCMAT (Mathematics Collaborative Learning Platform) is a collabora- tive adaptive learning tool based on progressive assessment for Mathematics in Basic Schools. The learning platform is based on a constructivist approach, assess- ing the user knowledge and presenting contents and activities adapted to the characteristics and learning style of the student. The intelligent behavior of such platform depends on the existence of a tentative description of the student – the student model (SM). The contents of this model and the student most prominent learning style are used by a domain and interaction model to select the most ap- propriate response to student actions. The SM is used to select the more appropri- ate learning object according the student learning stage. However, this selection demands for the access to metadata describing the contents of the learning object. This need leaded to the application of a standard to describe the learning objects (LO). The authoring of LO corresponds to one major maintenance costs present in these applications. PCMAT is able to generate several instances of the same learn- ing object through the parameterization of some features of the learning object. The platform is also able to process student responses in natural language. This project shows how techniques from Adaptive Hypermedia System (AHS) field can improve e-learning based systems in a basic school environment. 8.1 Introduction The main goal of Educational Adaptive Systems (EAS) is to achieve applications able to adequate its relation with the student in terms of content presentation, na- vigation, and interface according to a predefined but updatable SM (Brusilovsky 2001, De Bra et al. 2004).