Across many domains, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are used to facilitate practice, providing a customized learning environment and personal tutoring experience for students to learn at their own pace through effective student modeling and feedback. Most current ITSs are built around cognitive learning theories including Ohlsson’s theory on learning from performance errors and Anderson’s ACT theories of skill acquisition which focus primarily on providing negative feedback or corrective feedback, facilitating learning by correcting errors. Research into the behavior and methods used by expert tutors suggest that experienced tutors use positive feedback quite extensively and successfully. This research investigates positive feedback; learning by capturing and responding to correct behavior, supported by cognitive learning theories. The research aim is to develop and implement a systematic approach to delivering positive feedback in Intelligent Tutoring Systems, in particular SQL-Tutor, a constraint-based tutor which instructs users in the design of Structured Query Language (SQL) database queries. An evaluation study was conducted at the University of Canterbury involving a control group of students who used the original version of SQL-Tutor giving only

We present a study of human tutorial dialogues in a core Computer Science domain that: focuses on individual tutoring sessions, rather than on contrasting different types of tutors; uses multiple regression analysis to correlate features of those sessions with learning outcomes; and highlights the effects of two types of tutor moves that have not been studied in depth so far, direct instruction and positive feedback.

Abstract—We developed two versions of a system, called iList, that helps students learn linked lists, an important topic in Computer Science curricula. The two versions of iList differ on the level of feedback they can provide to the students, specifically in the explanation of syntax and execution errors. The system has been fielded in multiple classrooms in two institutions. Our results indicate that iList is effective, is considered interesting and useful by the students, and its performance is getting closer to the performance of human tutors. Moreover, the system is being developed in the context of a study of human tutoring, which is guiding the evolution of iList with empirical evidence of effective tutoring. Index Terms—K.3.1.b. Computer-assisted instruction, K.3.2.b Computer science education, I.2.1.d. Education, H.5.2.e. Evaluation/methodology, Constraint-based modeling, Intelligent tutoring systems 1