Detecting and Repairing Tutoring Failures
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Date
1988-06-21
Authors
Douglas, Sarah A.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
During 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.
Description
22 pages
Keywords
knowledge communication, ITS, tutor interaction failure, problem presentation and remediation