About the Workshop

 

Objectives

This workshop is intended to encourage collaboration and synergy among seasoned and beginning researchers in the areas of intelligent tutoring, motivation, affect, and cognition. Through presentations that highlight recent research advances and discussions on the major issues, the workshop will serve as a catalyst to speed up the development of functional affect-sensitive ITSs. The organizers hope to bring to the foreground non-intuitive and computationally tractable relationships between affect and learning that can scaffold the design and development of affect-sensitive educational systems. It will help define future research questions as well as establish an international network of researchers interested in this topic.

 

Issues

To study affect and cognition in intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), researchers address a diverse and dispersed set of questions, spanning theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and evaluations of results. They include but are not limited to: What are the relationships between cognition and affect? What is the impact of affect on cognitive processes (attention, memorization, understanding, decision making, etc.) and vice versa? What are the emotional and cognitive issues relevant to learning? How can we choose a suitable feedback for improving emotional and cognitive processes? Is affect specific to learning domains and contexts or does it generalizes across domains and contexts? When must an ITS detect affect and when can affect be safely ignored? What emotions should ITSs detect? What instrumentation is necessary for the detection (biometrics, self-reports, facial expressions, etc.)? How and when should ITSs adapt to affect? What pedagogical strategies should an ITS use to either mitigate negative affect or promote positive affect? When and to what degree is it necessary for intelligent pedagogical agents to express affect? What are some exemplars of affect-sensitive ITSs? How can considerations of emotional and cognitive factors contribute to more effective learning environments? How can we evaluate the effectiveness of affective ITSs? Could affective states be induced via intelligent tutors?