Natalie Person - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Natalie Person
Why/AutoTutor is a tutoring system that helps students construct answers to qualitative physics p... more Why/AutoTutor is a tutoring system that helps students construct answers to qualitative physics problems by holding a conversation in natural language. Why/AutoTutor provides feedback to the student on what the student types in (positive, neutral, negative feedback), pumps the student for more information, prompts the student to fill in missing words, gives hints, fills in missing information with assertions, identifies and corrects bad answers and misconceptions, answers students' questions, and summarizes answers. In essence, constructivist learning is implemented in a mixed-initiative dialog. Why/AutoTutor delivers its dialog moves with an animated conversational agent whereas students type in their answers via keyboard. We conducted an experiment that compared Why/AutoTutor with two control conditions (Read textbook, nothing) in assessments of learning gains. The tutoring system performed significantly better than the two control conditions on a test similar to the Force Con...
Recent advances in the development of intelligent tutoring systems include the addition of animat... more Recent advances in the development of intelligent tutoring systems include the addition of animated conversational agents that play the role of tutors (Person and Graesser 2002). These pedagogical agents can be programmed to
Questions and Information Systems, 2013
We construct an analytical expression for the distribution of gluons in the state immediately fol... more We construct an analytical expression for the distribution of gluons in the state immediately following a heavy ion collision in the quasi-classical limit of QCD given by McLerran-Venugopalan model. The resulting gluon number distribution function includes the effects of all multiple rescatterings of gluons with the nucleons of both colliding nuclei. The typical transverse momentum k ⊥ of the produced gluons is shown to be of the order of the saturation scale of the nuclei Qs, as predicted by Mueller. We analyze the properties of the obtained distribution and demonstrate that due to multiple rescatterings it remains finite (up to logarithms of k ⊥) in the soft transverse momentum limit of k ⊥ ≪ Qs unlike the usual perturbative initial conditions given by collinear factorization. We calculate the total number of produced gluons and show that it is proportional to the total number of gluons inside the nuclear wave function before the collision with the proportionality coefficient c ≈ 2 ln 2.
This purpose of this paper is to show how prevalent features of successful human tutoring interac... more This purpose of this paper is to show how prevalent features of successful human tutoring interactions can be integrated into a pedagogical agent, AutoTutor. AutoTutor is a fully automated computer tutor that responds to learner input by simulating the dialog moves of effective, normal human tutors. AutoTutor’s delivery of dialog moves is organized within a 5step framework that is unique to normal human tutoring interactions. We assessed AutoTutor’s performance as an effective tutor and conversational partner during tutoring sessions with virtual students of varying ability levels. Results from three evaluation cycles indicate the following: (1) AutoTutor is capable of delivering pedagogically effective dialog moves that mimic the dialog move choices of human tutors, and (2) AutoTutor is a reasonably effective conversational partner.
A multiplexing circuit including a plurality of amplifying stages connected in parallel between a... more A multiplexing circuit including a plurality of amplifying stages connected in parallel between an output terminal and a common terminal with each stage including an isolating diode, an amplifying transistor, and a switching transistor connected in series, the isolating diodes serving to isolate each stage from disturbances created by the other stages.
La reforma energetica en Mexico es uno de los cambios mas importantes que ha ocurrido en el pais ... more La reforma energetica en Mexico es uno de los cambios mas importantes que ha ocurrido en el pais en los ultimos 70 anos, por las fuertes implicaciones en los ambitos economico, politico y social. El curso masivo abierto en linea: «La reforma energetica en Mexico y sus oportunidades», representa una gran oportunidad para democratizar el conocimiento de estos temas y generar oportunidades de negocio. Al mismo tiempo, la tematica del curso ha facilitado la incorporacion de la estrategia de gamificacion basada en retos, cuyo proposito ha sido el de motivar a los participantes a aplicar los conocimientos del curso a partir de un reto cuyo logro se ve reflejado en un tablero de liderazgo, el cual, es visible para todos los participantes. En este capitulo se explican los aspectos mas importantes de la Reforma Energetica en Mexico y las oportunidades de negocio mas evidentes. Tambien se muestra un analisis descriptivo de los resultados del reto, su relacion con la evaluacion final y la tasa...
Int. J. Artif. Intell. Educ., 2010
We explored the affective states that students experienced during effortful problem solving activ... more We explored the affective states that students experienced during effortful problem solving activities. We conducted a study where 41 students solved difficult analytical reasoning problems from the Law School Admission Test. Students viewed videos of their faces and screen captures and judged their emotions from a set of 14 states (basic emotions, learning-centered emotions, and neutral) at relevant points in the problem solving process (after new problem is displayed, in the midst of problem solving, after feedback is received). The results indicated that curiosity, frustration, boredom, confusion, happiness, and anxiety were the major emotions that students experienced, while contempt, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, eureka, and surprise were rare. Follow-up analyses on the temporal dynamics of the emotions, their contextual underpinnings, and relationships to problem solving outcomes supported a general characterization of the affective dimension of problem solving. Affective sta...
We present a method to automatically detect collaborative patterns of student and tutor dialogue ... more We present a method to automatically detect collaborative patterns of student and tutor dialogue moves. The method identifies significant two-step excitatory transitions between dialogue moves, integrates the transitions into a directed graph representation, and generates and tests data-driven hypotheses from the directed graph. The method was applied to a large corpus of student-tutor dialogue moves from expert tutoring sessions. An examination of the subset of the corpus consisting of tutor lectures revealed collaborative patterns consistent with information-transmission, information-elicitation, off topic-conversation, and student initiated questions. Sequences of dialogue moves within each of these patterns were also identified. Comparisons of the method to other approaches and applications towards the computational modeling of expert human tutors are discussed.
Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Apr 24, 2019
In this paper we present a question generation approach suitable for tutorial dialogues. The appr... more In this paper we present a question generation approach suitable for tutorial dialogues. The approach is based on previous psychological theories that hypothesize questions are generated from a knowledge representation modeled as a concept map. Our model semi-automatically extracts concept maps from a textbook and uses them to generate questions. The purpose of the study is to generate and evaluate pedagogically-appropriate questions at varying levels of specificity across one or more sentences. The evaluation metrics include scales from the Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge and a new scale specific to the pedagogical nature of questions in tutoring 1.
AutoTutor's effectiveness as a tutor and conversational partner was assessed during three develop... more AutoTutor's effectiveness as a tutor and conversational partner was assessed during three development cycles of the system. In Cycle 1 AutoTutor interacted with virtual students, whereas in Cycles 2 and 3, AutoTutor interacted with human students. The tutoring transcripts for the three cycles were analyzed by two sets of knowledgeable judges. One set of judges rated the pedagogical quality of each AutoTutor dialog move; the other set rated the conversational appropriateness of each move. Data from three evaluative cycles are presented in the paper.
Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 2002
... Natalie Person1, Arthur C. Graesser2, & The Tutoring Research Group2 ... A series... more ... Natalie Person1, Arthur C. Graesser2, & The Tutoring Research Group2 ... A series of independent samples t-tests were performed to determine whether the human and computer means differed for the three six-point scale assessment questions used in Study 1 and 2. The means ...
Why/AutoTutor is a tutoring system that helps students construct answers to qualitative physics p... more Why/AutoTutor is a tutoring system that helps students construct answers to qualitative physics problems by holding a conversation in natural language. Why/AutoTutor provides feedback to the student on what the student types in (positive, neutral, negative feedback), pumps the student for more information, prompts the student to fill in missing words, gives hints, fills in missing information with assertions, identifies and corrects bad answers and misconceptions, answers students' questions, and summarizes answers. In essence, constructivist learning is implemented in a mixed-initiative dialog. Why/AutoTutor delivers its dialog moves with an animated conversational agent whereas students type in their answers via keyboard. We conducted an experiment that compared Why/AutoTutor with two control conditions (Read textbook, nothing) in assessments of learning gains. The tutoring system performed significantly better than the two control conditions on a test similar to the Force Con...
Recent advances in the development of intelligent tutoring systems include the addition of animat... more Recent advances in the development of intelligent tutoring systems include the addition of animated conversational agents that play the role of tutors (Person and Graesser 2002). These pedagogical agents can be programmed to
Questions and Information Systems, 2013
We construct an analytical expression for the distribution of gluons in the state immediately fol... more We construct an analytical expression for the distribution of gluons in the state immediately following a heavy ion collision in the quasi-classical limit of QCD given by McLerran-Venugopalan model. The resulting gluon number distribution function includes the effects of all multiple rescatterings of gluons with the nucleons of both colliding nuclei. The typical transverse momentum k ⊥ of the produced gluons is shown to be of the order of the saturation scale of the nuclei Qs, as predicted by Mueller. We analyze the properties of the obtained distribution and demonstrate that due to multiple rescatterings it remains finite (up to logarithms of k ⊥) in the soft transverse momentum limit of k ⊥ ≪ Qs unlike the usual perturbative initial conditions given by collinear factorization. We calculate the total number of produced gluons and show that it is proportional to the total number of gluons inside the nuclear wave function before the collision with the proportionality coefficient c ≈ 2 ln 2.
This purpose of this paper is to show how prevalent features of successful human tutoring interac... more This purpose of this paper is to show how prevalent features of successful human tutoring interactions can be integrated into a pedagogical agent, AutoTutor. AutoTutor is a fully automated computer tutor that responds to learner input by simulating the dialog moves of effective, normal human tutors. AutoTutor’s delivery of dialog moves is organized within a 5step framework that is unique to normal human tutoring interactions. We assessed AutoTutor’s performance as an effective tutor and conversational partner during tutoring sessions with virtual students of varying ability levels. Results from three evaluation cycles indicate the following: (1) AutoTutor is capable of delivering pedagogically effective dialog moves that mimic the dialog move choices of human tutors, and (2) AutoTutor is a reasonably effective conversational partner.
A multiplexing circuit including a plurality of amplifying stages connected in parallel between a... more A multiplexing circuit including a plurality of amplifying stages connected in parallel between an output terminal and a common terminal with each stage including an isolating diode, an amplifying transistor, and a switching transistor connected in series, the isolating diodes serving to isolate each stage from disturbances created by the other stages.
La reforma energetica en Mexico es uno de los cambios mas importantes que ha ocurrido en el pais ... more La reforma energetica en Mexico es uno de los cambios mas importantes que ha ocurrido en el pais en los ultimos 70 anos, por las fuertes implicaciones en los ambitos economico, politico y social. El curso masivo abierto en linea: «La reforma energetica en Mexico y sus oportunidades», representa una gran oportunidad para democratizar el conocimiento de estos temas y generar oportunidades de negocio. Al mismo tiempo, la tematica del curso ha facilitado la incorporacion de la estrategia de gamificacion basada en retos, cuyo proposito ha sido el de motivar a los participantes a aplicar los conocimientos del curso a partir de un reto cuyo logro se ve reflejado en un tablero de liderazgo, el cual, es visible para todos los participantes. En este capitulo se explican los aspectos mas importantes de la Reforma Energetica en Mexico y las oportunidades de negocio mas evidentes. Tambien se muestra un analisis descriptivo de los resultados del reto, su relacion con la evaluacion final y la tasa...
Int. J. Artif. Intell. Educ., 2010
We explored the affective states that students experienced during effortful problem solving activ... more We explored the affective states that students experienced during effortful problem solving activities. We conducted a study where 41 students solved difficult analytical reasoning problems from the Law School Admission Test. Students viewed videos of their faces and screen captures and judged their emotions from a set of 14 states (basic emotions, learning-centered emotions, and neutral) at relevant points in the problem solving process (after new problem is displayed, in the midst of problem solving, after feedback is received). The results indicated that curiosity, frustration, boredom, confusion, happiness, and anxiety were the major emotions that students experienced, while contempt, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, eureka, and surprise were rare. Follow-up analyses on the temporal dynamics of the emotions, their contextual underpinnings, and relationships to problem solving outcomes supported a general characterization of the affective dimension of problem solving. Affective sta...
We present a method to automatically detect collaborative patterns of student and tutor dialogue ... more We present a method to automatically detect collaborative patterns of student and tutor dialogue moves. The method identifies significant two-step excitatory transitions between dialogue moves, integrates the transitions into a directed graph representation, and generates and tests data-driven hypotheses from the directed graph. The method was applied to a large corpus of student-tutor dialogue moves from expert tutoring sessions. An examination of the subset of the corpus consisting of tutor lectures revealed collaborative patterns consistent with information-transmission, information-elicitation, off topic-conversation, and student initiated questions. Sequences of dialogue moves within each of these patterns were also identified. Comparisons of the method to other approaches and applications towards the computational modeling of expert human tutors are discussed.
Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Apr 24, 2019
In this paper we present a question generation approach suitable for tutorial dialogues. The appr... more In this paper we present a question generation approach suitable for tutorial dialogues. The approach is based on previous psychological theories that hypothesize questions are generated from a knowledge representation modeled as a concept map. Our model semi-automatically extracts concept maps from a textbook and uses them to generate questions. The purpose of the study is to generate and evaluate pedagogically-appropriate questions at varying levels of specificity across one or more sentences. The evaluation metrics include scales from the Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge and a new scale specific to the pedagogical nature of questions in tutoring 1.
AutoTutor's effectiveness as a tutor and conversational partner was assessed during three develop... more AutoTutor's effectiveness as a tutor and conversational partner was assessed during three development cycles of the system. In Cycle 1 AutoTutor interacted with virtual students, whereas in Cycles 2 and 3, AutoTutor interacted with human students. The tutoring transcripts for the three cycles were analyzed by two sets of knowledgeable judges. One set of judges rated the pedagogical quality of each AutoTutor dialog move; the other set rated the conversational appropriateness of each move. Data from three evaluative cycles are presented in the paper.
Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 2002
... Natalie Person1, Arthur C. Graesser2, & The Tutoring Research Group2 ... A series... more ... Natalie Person1, Arthur C. Graesser2, & The Tutoring Research Group2 ... A series of independent samples t-tests were performed to determine whether the human and computer means differed for the three six-point scale assessment questions used in Study 1 and 2. The means ...