Exploring Student Interactions with Tutorial Dialogues in a Substep-based Tutor

Abstract

Understanding students’ interactions with Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) allows us to improve the system as well as our pedagogical practices. Engaging students in tutorial dialogues is one of the strategies used by ITSs, which has been proven to improve learning significantly. This paper presents preliminary findings of a project that investigates how students interact with the tutorial dialogues in EER-Tutor using interaction videos in addition to eye-gaze data. We discuss some frequent misconceptions and behaviors student exhibited. Students usually focus on correcting one error at a time and then immediately submit their solutions to get feedback, thus not taking advantage of opportunities to reflect on what they have learnt. Based on the results, we identify several future directions of work on using eye-tracking for on-line adaptation.