An Adaptive Coach for Invention Activities

A focus in recent AIED research is to create adaptive support for learners in inquiry learning environments. However, only few examples of such support have been demonstrated. Our work focuses on Invention activities, inquiry activities in which students generate representations that explain data presented as contrasting cases. To help teachers implement these activities in their classrooms, we have created and pilot-tested a dedicated adaptive computer coach (the Invention Coach) and are currently evaluating it in a classroom study. The Coach’s pedagogical strategy balances structuring and problematizing, unlike many ITSs, which favor structuring. The Coach is implemented in CTAT as a model-tracing tutor, with a rule-based model that captures its pedagogical coaching strategy, designed in part based on data from human tutors. We describe the Invention Coach and its pedagogical model. We present evidence from our pilot tests that illustrate the tutor’s versatility and provide preliminary evidence of its effectiveness. The contributions of the work are: identifying an adaptive coaching strategy for Invention tasks that balances structuring and problematizing, and an automated coach for a successful instructional method (Invention) for which few tutors have been built.