Beverly Park Woolf

Actionable Affective Processing for Automatic Tutor Interventions

Once a tutoring system is able to detect students’ emotions, it is not obvious how to change the tutor’s behavior to leverage this emotion detection for the benefit of the student. For instance, if students state that they are excited, then providing harder problems may be appropriate in one case, while providing actions to calm them down so that they can better focus may be the best response in other cases. Both the cognitive and emotional states are important when choosing the tutor’s actions. The purpose of this chapter is to describe the elements necessary for a tutoring system that makes appropriate actions based on a detected affective state. This is broken down into three parts. First we describe several methods for emotion detection. Then we present a study using Wayang Outpost, our math tutor, using sensors to detect the student’s emotion and taking actions based on that emotion. Then we discuss potential actions for the detected emotions. We conclude with future steps needed to improve the actions of tutoring systems in general.

Exploring the Impact of a Learning Dashboard on Student Affect

Research highlights that many students experience negative emotions during learning activities, and these can have a detrimental impact on behaviors and outcomes. Here, we investigate the impact of a particular kind of affective intervention, namely a learning dashboard, on two deactivating emotions: boredom and lack of excitement. The data comes from a study we conducted with over 200 middle school students interacting with an intelligent tutor that provided varying levels of support to encourage dashboard use. We analyze the data using a range of techniques to show that the learning dashboard is associated with reduced deactivating emotions, but that its utility also depends on the way its use is promoted and on students’ gender.

Analyzing affective constructs: emotions ‘n attitudes

We analyze the relationship between a variety of affective constructs that have been researched, as it is not clear what is the breadth of affecitve variables to model --- which constructs are equivalent, related, or unrelated.