Balancing Cognitive and Motivational Scaffolding in Tutorial Dialogue

A key challenge in the design of tutorial dialogue systems is identifying tutorial strategies that can effectively balance the tradeoffs between cognitive and affective student outcomes. This balance is problematic because the precise nature of the interdependence between cognitive and affective strategies is not well understood. Furthermore, previous studies suggest that some cognitive and motivational goals are at odds with one another because a tutorial strategy designed to maximize one may negatively impact the other. This paper reports on a tutorial dialogue study that investigates motivational strategies and cognitive feedback. It was found that the choice of corrective tutorial strategy makes a significant difference in the outcomes of both student learning gains and self-efficacy gains.