The Role of Why Questions in Effective Human Tutoring

It is undoubtedly true that one prominent component of effective human tutoring is collaborative dialogue between student and tutor [7, 12]. Nevertheless, many important questions remain to be answered about which features of human tutorial dialogue make it effective and how the most effective human tutoring strategies can be implemented in a tutorial dialogue system. In this paper we present an analysis of a corpus of human tutoring dialogues where we examine which features correlate significantly with learning gains. In particular we explore the role of Why questions and other open ended questions in creating opportunities for student learning as well as the role of explicit negative feedback for wrong answers.