Collaboration and Cognitive Tutoring: Integration, Empirical Results, and Future Directions

In this paper, we describe progress we have made toward providing cognitive tutoring to students within a collaborative software environment. First, we have integrated a collaborative software tool, Cool Modes, with software designed to develop Cognitive Tutors (the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tool). Our initial integration provides a means to capture data that acts as the foundation of a tutor for collaboration but does not yet fully support actual tutoring. Second, we've performed two exploratory studies in which dyads of students used our software to collaborate in solving modelling tasks. These studies uncovered five dimensions of observed behavior that point to the need for abstraction of student actions to better recognize, analyze, and correct collaborative steps in problem solving. We discuss plans to incorporate such analyses into our approach and to extend our tools to eventually provide tutoring of collaboration.