Motivation diagnosis in intelligent tutoring systems

Abstract

Despite being of crucial importance in Education, the issue of motivation has been only very recently explicitly addressed in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). In the few studies done, the main focus has been on motivational planning (i.e. how to plan the instruction in order to motivate the student). In this paper we argue that motivation diagnosis (i.e. how to detect the student’s motivational state) is of crucial importance for creating ‘motivating’ ITSs, and that more research is needed in this area. After an introduction, we review some relevant research on motivation diagnosis, and then we suggest directions which further research in this area might take. Although the issues discussed here are still poorly understood, this paper attempts to encourage research in the ITS community in what we believe is one of the most important aspects of instruction.