affect-sensitive intelligent tutor

One of the established strengths of human tutors is
their ability to recognise and adapt to the emotions
of students. This is a skill that has traditionally
been lacking from Intelligent Tutoring Systems
(ITSs); despite their ability to intelligently model
and adapt to aspects of the student s cognitive
state, ITSs are generally completely unable to detect
or adapt to aspects of the student s affective state.

In response to this shortcoming, this book explores
the exciting development of an emotion-sensitive
ITS. With the empathy of effective human tutors as
our blueprint, we investigate how an artificial tutor
should adapt to the affective state of students. To
inform the tutor s adaptation to student affect, a
novel method for student modelling and
emotion-sensitive tutoring strategies has been
developed using a fuzzy, case-based reasoning
approach. As a validation of the feasibility of an
emotion-sensitive tutoring system, we implement and
test our method in an Affective Tutoring System (ATS)
for counting and addition, Easy with Eve, featuring
an empathetic animated pedagogical agent, Eve.