Integrating Learner Help Requests Using a POMDP in an Adaptive Training System

This paper describes the development and empirical testing of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) with two emerging methodologies: (1) a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) for representing the learner model and (2) inquiry modeling, which informs the learner model with questions learners ask during instruction. POMDPs have been successfully applied to non-ITS domains but, until recently, have seemed intractable for large-scale intelligent tutoring challenges. New, ITS-specific representations leverage common regularities in intelligent tutoring to make a POMDP practical as a learner model. Inquiry modeling is a novel paradigm for informing learner models by observing rich features of learners’ help requests such as categorical content, context, and timing. The experiment described in this paper demonstrates that inquiry modeling and planning with POMDPs can yield significant and substantive learning improvements in a realistic, scenario-based training task.