The Social Role of Technical Personnel in the Deployment of Intelligent Tutoring Systems Ryan Shaun BAKER Angela Z. WAGNER Albert T. CORBETT Kenneth R. KOEDINGER July 2004 CMU-HCII-04-100 School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Abstract Most of the prior descriptions of the important relationships in Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) projects have focused on the relationships involved in their use in classrooms, treating their presence in the classroom as a given. There has been some discussion of how intelligent tutors are developed [13] and of how an Intelligent Tutor, once developed, can be disseminated widely [5], but there has been considerably less discussion of the deployment of prototype ITSs. In this paper, we present a model of the relationships involved in deploying a prototype intelligent tutoring system in order to conduct formative evaluation. We show that field technical personnel play a pivotal role in this process, serving as vital conduits for information and negotiation between ITS researchers and school personnel such as teachers and principals. This model was developed using Contextual Inquiries [4] and interviews of project members. This work was funded by an NDSEG (National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate) Fellowship, and by NSF grant 9720359 to “CIRCLE: Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Constructive Learning Environments”. Keywords: cognitive tutors, cognitive tutor classrooms, mathematics education, contextual inquiry, organizational modeling, deployment of educational software