Adapting Collaboration Dialogue in Response to Intelligent Tutoring System Feedback

Abstract

To be able to provide better support for collaborative learning in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, it is important to understand how collaboration patterns change. Prior work has looked at the interdependencies between utterances and the change of dialogue over time, but it has not addressed how dialogue changes during a lesson, an analysis that allows us to investigate the adaptivity of student strategies as students gain domain knowledge. We address this question by analyzing the shift in types of collaborative talk occurring within a single session and in particular how they relate to errors for 26 4^th and 5^th grade dyads working on a fractions tutor. We found that, over time, the frequency of interactive talk and errors both decrease in dyads working together on conceptual problems. Although interactive talk is often held as a gold standard in collaboration, as students become more proficient, it may not be as important.