Using Affective Leaner States to Enhance Learning

A tutor’s ability to adapt the tutorial strategy to a student’s emotional and cognitive states is an important factor contributing to the effectiveness of human one-on-one tutoring. Even though tutoring systems were developed with the aim of providing the experience of human one-on-one tutoring to masses of students in an economical way, using learners’ emotional states to adapt tutorial strategies have been ignored until very recently. This paper proposes an initial study to understand how human tutors adapt their teaching strategies based on the affective needs of students. The findings of the study will be used to investigate how these strategies could be incorporated into an existing tutoring system which can then adapt the tutoring environment based on the learner’s affect and cognitive models.