Defining the behavior of an affective learning companion in the affective meta-tutor project

Abstract

Research in affective computing and educational technology has shown the potential of affective interventions to increase student's self-concept and motivation while learning. Our project aims to investigate whether the use of affective interventions in a meta-cognitive tutor can help students achieve deeper modeling of dynamic systems by being persistent in their use of meta-cognitive strategies during and after tutoring. This article is an experience report on how we designed and implemented the affective intervention. (The meta-tutor is described in a separate paper.) We briefly describe the theories of affect underlying the design and how the agent's affective behavior is defined and implemented. Finally, the evaluation of a detector-driven categorization of student behavior, that guides the agent's affective interventions, against a categorization performed by human coders, is presented. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.