CAPIT: an intelligent tutoring system for capitalisation and punctuation

We describe a new Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that teaches the mechanical rules of English capitalisation and punctuation. Students must interactively capitalise and punctuate short pieces of unpunctuated, lower case text (the completion exercise). The system represents the domain as a set of constraints specifying the correct patterns of punctuation and capitalisation, and feedback is given on violated constraints. The ITS was evaluated during several sessions in a classroom of 10-11 year old school children. The results show that the children effectively mastered the 25 rules represented in the system.