Evaluating dialogue schemata with the wizard of Oz computer-assisted algebra tutor

Abstract

The Wooz tutor of the North Carolina A&T algebra tutorial dialogue project is a computer program that mediates keyboard-to-keyboard tutoring of algebra problems, with the feature that it can suggest to the tutor canned structures of tutoring goals and canned sentences to insert into the tutoring dialogue. It is designed to facilitate and record a style of tutoring where the tutor and student collaboratively construct an answer in the form of an equation, a style often attested in natural tutoring of algebra. The algebra tutoring dialogue project collects and analyzes these dialogues with the aim of describing tutoring strategies and language with enough rigor that they may be evaluated and incorporated in machine tutoring. By plugging our analyzed dialogues into the computer-suggested tutoring component of the Wooz tutor we can evaluate the fitness of our dialogue analysis. © Springer-Verlag 2004 s.