Reformulating student contributions in tutorial dialogue

While some recent work in tutorial dialogue has touched upon tutor reformulations of student contributions, there has not yet been an attempt to characterize the intentions of reformulations in this educational context nor an attempt to determine which types of reformulation actually contribute to student learning. In this paper we take an initial look at tutor reformulations of student contributions in naturalistic tutorial dialogue in order to characterize the range of pedagogical intentions that may be associated with these reformulations. We further outline our plans for implementing reformulation in our tutorial dialogue system, Rimac, which engages high school physics students in post problem solving reflective discussions. By implementing reformulations in a tutorial dialogue system we can begin to test their impact on student learning in a more controlled way in addition to testing whether our approximation of reformulation is adequate.