The effects of personalised mathematic instruction supported by an intelligent tutoring system during the COVID-19 epidemic and the post-epidemic era

Abstract

It is hard to find an empirical study that examines the online learning or blended learning's effect on school pupils' regular exam performance during the COVID-19 epidemic and afterwards. This study attempts to fill in this research gap. An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) was utilised in mathematics online instruction in many elementary and middle schools in China. It supports individualised teaching and learning and has positive effect on students' learning. Two case studies are introduced to illustrate the system's functions and effects on students' mathematics learning performance. In the first case, a mathematics teacher in a junior high school provided the students with differentiated assignments during the epidemic. In the second case, a teacher in a primary school utilised the ITS to implement blended learning after the epidemic. Quasi-experiments were conducted and the regular examination's data analysis result shows that the treatment group outperformed the control group.