Intelligent Tutoring System - Current and Future Directions

Current and Future Directions

Some aspects that human tutors can do that intelligent tutoring systems are still limited by are in the areas of dialogue and feedback. One reason for these limitations are that human tutors are able to interpret the affective state of the student. Current research has been focusing on how to improve on these areas of ITS to make it more effective.

Dialogue

Human tutors have the ability to understand a person’s tone and inflection within a dialogue and interpret this to provide continual feedback through an ongoing dialogue. Intelligent tutoring systems are now being developed to attempt to simulate natural conversations. To get the full experience of dialogue there are many different areas in which a computer must be programmed; including being able to understand tone, inflection, body language, and facial expression and then to respond to these. Dialogue in an ITS can be used to ask specific questions to help guide students and elicit information while allowing students to construct their own knowledge. The development of more sophisticated dialogue within an ITS has been a focus in some current research partially to address the limitations and create a more constructivist approach to ITS.

Affective

There is a growing body of work that is considering the role of affect on learning and trying to develop intelligent tutoring systems that will be able to interpret and adapt to the different emotional states. Humans do not just use cognitive processes in learning but the affective processes they go through also plays an important role. For example, learners learn better when they have a certain level of disequilibrium (frustration), but not enough to make the learner feel completely overwhelmed. This has motivated affective computing to begin to produce and research creating intelligent tutoring systems that can interpret the affective process of an individual. An ITS can be developed to read an individual’s expressions and other signs of affect in an attempt to find and tutor to the optimal affective state for learning. There are many complications in doing this since affect is not expressed in just one way but in multiple ways so that for an ITS to be effective in interpreting affective states it may require a multimodal approach (tone, facial expression, etc...). These ideas have created a new field within ITS, that of Affective Tutoring Systems (ATS). One example of an ITS that addresses affect is Gaze Tutor which was developed to track students eye movements and determine whether they are bored or distracted and then the system attempts to reengage the student.