ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses assessment studies of the tutor and our experiences with it in the classroom. It also discusses LISP and a picture of the student's interaction with the tutor. The LISP Intelligent Tutoring System (LISPITS) is an instructional program that helps students learns to program in the computer language LISP. The tutor was developed for two major purposes: to automate some of the advantages of a personal tutor, thereby making them more widely available and to test the real-world applicability of a psychological theory of skill acquisition, called ACT*. The tutor reduces working memory load largely by providing templates for function calls. In the assessment research to date, students using LISPITS complete the coding exercises substantially more rapidly than those working on their own, although not as fast as students working with a human tutor. The fundamental assumptions give rise to the tutoring principles and govern the general nature of LISPITS.
