Manolis Mavrikis

Diagnosing and acting on student affect: the tutor's perspective

In this paper we explore human tutors’ inferences in relation to learners’ affective states and the relationship between those inferences and the actions that tutors take as their consequence. At the core of the investigations presented in this paper lie fundamental questions associated with the role of affective considerations in computer-mediated educational interactions. Theory of linguistic politeness is used as the basis for determining the contextual factors relevant to human tutors’s actions, with special attention being dedicated to learner affective states. A study was designed to determine what affective states of the learners are relevant to tutoring mathematics and to identify the mechanisms used by tutors to predict such states. Logs of tutor-student dialogues were recorded along with contextual factors taken into consideration by tutors in relation to their specific tutorial dialogue moves. The logs were annotated in order to determine the types and range of student and tutor actions. Machine learning techniques were then applied to those actions to predict the values of three factors: student confidence, interest and effort. Whilst due to limited size and sparsity of data the results are not conclusive, they are very valuable as the basis for empirically derived hypotheses to be tested in further studies. The potential implications of the hypotheses, if they were confirmed by further studies, are discussed in relation to the impact of tutor’s ability to diagnose student affect on the nature of computer-mediated tutorial interactions.

Mathematical, Interactive Exercise Generation from Static Documents.

We present an exercise description language suitable for the representation of interactive exercises which involve mathematical entities, and have complex structures. One of the goals of the language is to provide primitives for support of interactive environments where adaptive presentation of steps and feedback is required. Using this scheme, exercises can be generated from static documents, in what can be seen as a layered scheme: the interactivity layer is applied over the static layer, yielding an interactive version of the content. This significantly speeds up the authoring process, makes the document management process easier, and helps in reusing the document. We believe that the information model presented in this paper, as well as the proposed way of deployment, may provide grounds for new extensions of todays standards helping to overcome some of the limitations that they currently have.

Improving Knowledge Representation, Tutoring, and Authoring in a Component-Based ILE

With the objective of improving the tutoring and authoring capabilities of an existing ILE we describe how an open architecture and the use of the JavaBean specification helps to integrate JESS, improves its knowledge representation and opens up the system to interoperability and component reuse. In addition, we investigate the feasibility of integrating the suite of Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTAT) and illustrate issues which concern its use for authoring exploratory activities and representing instructional knowledge.

User-centred design & development of an applied Web-based ITS

We describe how a user-centred engineering cycle is employed during the development of a Web-based instructional system for first year science and engineering students learning mathematics. After an overview of the relevant methodology and appropriate theory that influences the systems design, we briefly present the system together with the steps that led to its integration in the teaching environment as well as to reusable materials and components for other environments.