Cecile A. Perret

Am I Wrong or Am I Right? Gains in Monitoring Accuracy in an Intelligent Tutoring System for Writing

We investigated whether students increased their self-assessment accuracy and essay scores over the course of an intervention with a writing strategy intelligent tutoring system, W-Pal. Results indicate that students were able to learn from W-Pal, and that the combination of strategy instruction, game-based practice, and holistic essay-based practice led to equivalent gains in self-assessment accuracy compared to heavier doses of deliberate writing practice (offering twice the amount of system feedback).

Promoting Metacognitive Awareness within a Game-Based Intelligent Tutoring System

Metacognitive awareness has been shown to be a critical skill for academic success. However, students often struggle to regulate this ability during learning tasks. The current study investigates how features designed to promote metacognitive awareness can be built into the game-based intelligent tutoring system (ITS) iSTART-2. College students (n=28) interacted with iSTART-2 for one hour, completing lesson videos and practice activities. If students’ performance fell below a minimum threshold during game-based practice, they received a pop-up that alerted them of their poor performance and were subsequently transitioned to a remedial activity. Results revealed that students’ scores in the system improved after they were transitioned (even when they did not complete the remedial activity). This suggests that the pop-up feature in iSTART-2 may indirectly promote metacognitive awareness, thus leading to increased performance. These results provide insight into the potential benefits of real-time feedback designed to promote metacognitive awareness within a game-based learning environment.

StairStepper: An Adaptive Remedial iSTART Module

This paper introduces StairStepper, a new addition to Interactive Strategy Training for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART), an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that provides adaptive self-explanation training and practice. Whereas iSTART focuses on improving comprehension at levels geared toward answering challenging questions associated with complex texts, StairStepper focuses on improving learners’ performance when reading grade-level expository texts. StairStepper is designed as a scaffolded practice activity wherein text difficulty level and task are adapted according to learners’ performance. This offers a unique module that provides reading comprehension tutoring through a combination of self-explanation practice and answering of multiple-choice questions representative of those found in standardized tests.