1. QA on AutoTutor 2004 paper CPI 494, March 31, 2009 Kurt VanLehn

2. What did AutoTutor look like? Animated agent + dialogue box; voice; Input from student = typed response; may be a couple of words Technology for voice = MS voice (Alan Black; LTI – Festivox) – There was version that understood speech, sortof Gestures = Facial, hand waves inward, – Was version that pointed Can switch faces; no big diff on gains & motivation – Absent agent may not make a different Voice first then text

3. What was AutoTutor’s “script”? Give overall question; first student turn = usually not complete or correct; Tutor picks an aspect of the correct, complete answer and tries to get student to say it. Tutor pump/prompts; T hints; T assert Repeat for each missing aspect – Follow the student vs. own ordering – conceptual prereqs Also answes the student’s questions

4. What is AutoTutor trying to teach? Drive stueent with hints to articulate all the aspects of the ideal answer Its main questions are deep Constructivist practice; learn by (self-) questioning – Transfer studies? Types of knowledge – Facts? Concepts? Procedures? Principles? – Facts are too shallow to benefit from AT vs. drill – Concepts OK – Princpiles, especially how to apply them – Could be procedure, but not perhaps the best;

5. How is AutoTutor different from human tutoring on the same content? AutoTutor is based on shallower understanding of the student. Based on pattern match (LSA) between its ideal answer aspects and the student’s response. Human’s do not use super sophisticated tutoring Humans often do same remediation cycle By-stander turing test

6. Is AutoTutor’s dialogue natural? By stander test – May be is Hand out dialogues later – Logic is screwy

7. In terms of learning gains, was AutoTutor effective? All conditions similar on shallow questions AutoTutor beat no-tutor and textbook on deep qustions and cloze questions Interaction plateaus Motivation unknow resutls…

8. What kinds of task domains would AutoTutor be good for?

9. How did AutoTutor analyze the student’s responses? LSA Bag of words (unordered list with duplicates allowed)

10. In terms of step-based tutoring, what are AutoTutor’s steps?

11. In terms of step-based tutoring, what feedback and hints exist for steps?

12. Does AutoTutor have an outer loop over tasks?

13. What model of the student does AutoTutor have?