Generating Pedagogical Questions to Help Students Learn

Abstract

One of the important features of intelligent tutoring systems is providing feedback so that the learners who have problems can understand and fix their errors. Two popular approaches to implementing it are demonstrating worked examples and providing explanatory feedback about the errors the learner made. Pedagogical questions - small, specific questions aimed at the thought process required to make the correct conclusion are often overlooked. Generating pedagogical questions to help the learner is beneficial because answering questions stimulates information retrieval and thinking. It also gives the tutoring system detailed information about the learner’s misconceptions. However, creating systems of pedagogical questions manually requires a lot of effort, even in relatively simple domains. In this paper, we propose four kinds of pedagogical questions that can be generated from a formal description of the taught skill, provide examples of pedagogical questions, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of their use.