MSc Thesis Presentation | Vedant Bahel

Name: Vedant R Bahel
Date: April 30th, 2024
Time: 11 am  
Location: ICCS 104
Supervisor: Cristina Conati

Title: Personalizing explanations of AI hints to users’ cognitive abilities in an intelligent tutoring system 

Abstract:

We investigate personalizing the explanations that an Intelligent Tutoring System generates to justify the hints it provides to students to foster their learning. The personalization targets students with low levels of two long-term traits, the Need for Cognition and Conscientiousness, and aims to enhance these students’ engagement with the explanations, based on prior findings that these students do not naturally engage with the explanations but would benefit from them if they do. To evaluate the effectiveness of the personalization, we conducted a user study where we found that our proposed personalization significantly increases our target users’ interaction with the hint explanations, their understanding of the hints and their learning. Hence, this work provides valuable insights into effectively personalizing AI-driven explanations for cognitively demanding tasks such as learning. This design for personalization was selected from among two distinct designs initially tested against each other, with a separate discussion provided within this thesis. Furthermore, with a long-term vision of personalizing explanations based on users’ short-term states, mainly confusion, we conducted an exploratory study to capture instances of user confusion related to ACSP hints and their interaction with accessing explanations, aiming to investigate users' reliance on hint explanations amidst confusion.