Inducing and Tracking Confusion with Contradictions during Critical Thinking and Scientific Reasoning

Dynamics of affective states during complex learning

“…Perhaps a more direct method to induce confusion would be to intentionally cause discrepancies that challenge students' existing mental models and prior knowledge. For example, we have successfully induced confusion by presenting participants with descriptions of device malfunctions (D'Mello & Graesser, submitted for publication) and by introducing contradictions in tutorial dialogs (Lehman et al, 2011).…”

Modelling Human Teaching Tactics and Strategies for Tutoring Systems: 14 Years On

“…Thus Lehman and her colleagues set up a variation on Socratic tutoring in which there was an explicit contradiction and then helped the student to figure out the nature of it. Normally this happens when the student discovers a bug or is told that there is a bug in his or her answer, but in the case of the work of Lehman and her colleagues, the contradiction was deliberately introduced by the tutor, and then it was the system's role to support the student in dealing with it (Lehman et al 2013). In addition to work directly on affect, there has also been progress in allied areas such as politeness (Porayska-Pomsta et al 2008), cultural norms (Johnson 2010) and the differential feedback needs of different personality types (Dennis et al 2011;Robison et al 2010).…”

AutoTutor and Family: A Review of 17 Years of Natural Language Tutoring

“…D'Mello and Graesser (2012b) used data from AutoTutor-AS to develop a model of learning-relevant emotions which includes engagement, surprise, frustration, delight/achievement, disengagement, confusion, and boredom. This model posited that inducing some short-term confusion could be beneficial for learning, which has been verified experimentally (D'Mello et al 2014;Lehman et al 2013) verified. Combined with earlier findings, this indicates that learning is improved when (a) disengagement is reduced (e.g., by reacting to gaze), (b) brief confusion is induced (e.g., by presenting conflicting information), and (c) frustrated learners with low knowledge receive affective support.…”

“…For students who are having trouble with the material, vicarious learning is suitable, but the human is drawn in periodically by asking them to answer simple yes/no verification questions. For students who have deep mastery of the material, it is appropriate to have teachable-agent designs, with the human student teaching the simulated student, detecting errors in their reasoning, and resolving conflicting opinions between the two agents (Lehman et al 2013). This design was particularly beneficial for tutoring critical thinking in ARIES, allowing different agents to represent information sources that disagree.…”