Teammate Relationships Improve Help-Seeking Behavior in an Intelligent Tutoring System

This paper describes a method for improving students’ help-seeking behavior by creating a teammate relationship between intelligent tutors and students. Help seeking in intelligent tutors involves student self-regulation as described in learning theory and can be explored from the perspective of social psychology. We describe an experiment in which ninety-seven students were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions and students in the treatment group were supported to relate to the Wayang Math Tutor as teammates by providing the help button named “Work Together”. The result suggests that students who treated the tutor as teammates saw more hints (asked for more hints), exhibited reduced quick-guessing behavior and did not abuse hints while working together to solve math problems.