We gratefully acknowledge our sponsors, the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.
In this domain, we also experimented with the effect of automatic generation of simple feedback. We built three different versions of an interface to an ITS that tutors students in this domain. In the neutral version of the ITS, the only feedback students receive is via color coding, green for correct, red for incorrect; in the positive version, they receive feedback via the same color coding, and in addition, verbal feedback on correct responses only; in the negative version, they receive feedback via the same color coding, and in addition, verbal feedback on incorrect responses only. We ran a between-subject experiment, in which each group of subjects interacted with one of the systems. We found that, even if students in the verbal conditions do perform slightly better and make fewer mistakes, these differences are not significant.
Currently, we are annotating the dialogues for tutor and student moves to extract dialogue patterns. We will then build a more sophisticated interface in which feedback is given according to these dialogue patterns.