Repairing Disengagement - Summary of my topic

Students need to be motivated while they are learning. As a human, one has a very good chance to motivate a person who is learning something, espacially if one is familiar with that person. But how does a tutoring system know how to motivate a student?

This is what Ivon Arroyo and others discuss in the paper "Repairing Disengagement With Non-Invasive Interventions". The main question is how to re-engage students that are disengaged or how to let students still be engaged.

If it comes to tutoring software one problem is that students are becoming disengaged and do something which is known as "gaming". "Gaming" the system means that the student is requesting hints until it is very close to solve the problem or the hint already consists of the solution. It is clear that this works without any thinking which is definetely not the purpose of a tutoring system.

To repair disengagement you need a good knowledge of what is useful for students and their learning process. To get this knowledge an experiment is being made in which 88 students are using the Wayang system (a multimedia tutoring system for geometry) and had to answer 43 items.