Cognitive Tutor Use in Chile: Understanding Classroom and Lab Culture

Abstract

As technological capabilities flourish around the world, intelligent tutoring systems are being deployed globally to provide learners with access to quality educational interventions. Such systems have been widely studied in in-vivo deployments in the Western world, allowing for the development of sophisticated models of behavior within the system that have been shown to accurately represent and support learning. Yet, these models have recently been shown not to reliably transfer across cultures. Given that culture has a strong influence on the types of behaviors that affect learning, such as help-seeking and motivation, it is important to understand these learning behaviors in new cultures in order to best support students using these systems. In this paper, we report on our qualitative and quantitative field observations of student behaviors in two different schools (urban and rural) and two different learning contexts (ITS lab and the math classroom) in central Chile. We report on both our quantitative analyses, as well as the contexts our qualitative data create. Overall, we observed evidence indicating students across schools exhibit different behaviors in the ITS lab vs the classroom, especially with respect to student interaction, movement, and on-task behavior, yet these students behave altogether differently from previously observed U.S. student populations. These results have implications for future modeling efforts of help-seeking and engagement in advanced learning technologies in new global contexts.