A System for Concerned Teaching of Musical Aural Skills Geraint A. Wiggins Department of Computing City University, London Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB England geraint@city.ac.uk Shari Trewin Division of Informatics University of Edinburgh 80 South Bridge Edinburgh EH1 1HN Scotland shari@dai.ed.ac.uk Abstract We present teaching concerns , a domain-independent mechanism for controlling the content and form of automated teaching interactions. Concerns represent commonsense teaching requirements such as challenging a student. Concerns have been implemented in Tapper, a new system for musical ear training. We describe and give real examples of concerns in action within Tapper. We claim that this approach produces sensible and explicable individualised interactions within a loosely structured curriculum. 1 Introduction and Overview 1.1 Motivation In this paper, we describe the teaching strategy applied in Tapper, a new system for musical ear training, and give examples of teaching in progress in experimental sessions with children. A particular contribution of this work is the inclusion in Tapper’s control mechanism of the notion of teaching concern. A teaching concern is a particular governing aspect of the teaching process, on which a teacher might be focussed at a particular time. For example, teaching concerns implemented in the current system include boosting the confidence of a beginner and broadening the coverage of the student’s knowledge. Not all concerns are active at all times, and their changing strengths interact to control the behaviour of the system. Tapper chooses a path through the curriculum based on the teaching concerns and on the performance of the student, giving a more natural and precisely tailored learning experience than would be otherwise possible. 1.2 Overview of the Paper In 2, we survey related ITS technology. In 3, we give a high-level overview of the architecture of Tapper, then focussing on the primary topic of this paper, the use of teaching concerns, in 4. We present some case studies of concerns in action in a formative evaluation of the system in 5. Finally, in 6 we summarise the contribution of the work, and suggest avenues for further research. 2 Related Work Our work is set in context of several well-known ITS architectures, all of which encode a notion of teaching strategy, though none of these is exactly the same as that in Tapper. 1 This work was mostly carried out while the first author was working at the Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. The second author is now working in the Accessibility Research group, IBM T J Watson Research Center. Correspondence should be addressed to the first author. 1