Classifying Student Initiatives and Tutor Responses in Human Keyboard-to-Keyboard Tutoring Sessions

Abstract

This study analyzed twenty-eight 1-hr-long tutoring sessions that were carried out keyboard-to-keyboard with tutor and student in different rooms. The tutors were professors of physiology at Rush Medical College. The students were 1st-year medical students. We classified student initiatives and tutor responses in human tutoring sessions with the goal of making our intelligent tutoring system capable of handling mixed-initiative dialogue. Student initiatives were classified along 4 dimensions: communicative goal, surface form, focus of attention, and degree of certainty (i.e., does the student hedge or not?). Student goals included request for confirmation, request for information, challenge, refusal to answer, and conversational repair. Tutor responses were classified along 3 dimensions: communicative goal, surface form, and delivery mode. The tutor goals included causal explanation, acknowledgment, conversational repair, instruction in the rules of the game, teaching the problem-solving algorithm, and teaching the language of physiology. Our interrater reliability studies supported these categories in the domain of tutoring.