Douglas, Sarah A.2023-06-202023-06-201988-06-21https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2842522 pagesDuring the course of studying a number of protocols of human tutors working with human students, I became aware of a complex process of interaction failure and repair. Although much ITS research has been devoted to the understanding and modeling of the detection and repair of student performance failure and misconception in learning curriculum concepts, there is little understanding of an equivalent self-detection and repair issue with tutor performance failure and misconception about what the student is taught. Indeed, there seems to have been a failure to examine the heart of intelligent tutoring systems, what Wenger ( 1987) terms knowledge communication. Communication is an inherent dyadic relation whose primary performance feature is interaction. In particular, interaction between humans, as all human performance, appears filled with both slips and bugs. Humans are highly tuned to the detection and repair of these problems. In the remainder of this paper, I present examples of some of the types of tutor interaction failure that I discovered in these protocols, discuss the detection and repair strategies used, and, finally, discuss the implications of these findings for ITS. My conclusion about tutoring failures is that some types can possibly be reduced by use of an intelligent tutoring system, but that others, called model failures, are an inherent part of the teaching of complex domains. Knowledge and the communication of knowledge are inextricably intertwined. Since we cannot create error-free ITS, we should study in more detail the mechanisms of failure detection and repair that are inherent in human interaction. I believe that achieving this goal will require a much finer grain of analysis of the process of student response during both problem .presentation and remediation and will place a greater emphasis on the detailed design of the interface of ITS.enCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USknowledge communicationITStutor interaction failureproblem presentation and remediationArticle