Fitting spatial ability into intelligent tutoring systems development

Building effective learning environments is an art that can only be perfected by a great deal of explorations involving the environments' audience: the learners. This paper focuses on taking into account the learners' spatial ability into the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems. We modified ERM-Tutor, a constraint-based tutor that teaches logical database design, to provide not only textual feedback messages, but also messages containing combinations of text and pictures, in accordance with the multimedia theory of learning. Results of a preliminary study performed show a promising indication for further explorations. We plan to use these results as the basis for another evaluation study in early 2007.