Um modelo de agente pedagógico para o treinamento adaptativo da habilidade metacognitiva de monitoramento do conhecimento em sistemas tutores inteligentes

Abstract

Students who are aware of their metacognitive processes have better performance and are more strategic than students who do not have this awareness. Metacognition is the knowledge of a person on their own cognitive processes. It is a fundamental construct for self-regulated learning, in which the students define their learning goals, plans and select study strategies, monitor and evaluate their performance and control their learning. More specifically, a fundamental metacognitive skill is knowledge monitoring, that is, a person's ability to identify what she knows and what she does not know. The metacognitive processes can be improved through training. Some related works have sought to train learner’s metacognitive skills, however, they have at least some of the following shortcomings: do not incite the student to reflect on their knowledge explicitly; do not explain the importance of metacognitive skills; do not evaluate the knowledge monitoring skill. In addition, none of the work adapts the instruction step that incites the monitoring of knowledge to student’s knowledge and metacognitive skills. The present work proposes a pedagogical agent model to train, explicitly, the student’s ability to monitor his knowledge. The model adapts the quantity and content of metacognitive instruction to the student, so that: he would have a less reactive attitude, he would reflect on their knowledge before solving a task; he would reflect on the knowledge already demonstrated; he would reflect on similar tasks resolved earlier. The model can be integrated with step-based Intelligent Tutoring Systems that provide information about the student's knowledge in the domain, the solving task history and the possible knowledge to be applied in a next step. The agent was implemented and integrated into an algebra STI for an experimental evaluation with 63 students. Evaluation results presented evidences indicating that the instruction of the agent can improve the student's knowledge monitoring ability. The results also indicated that the agent's instruction can improve student performance in the domain. In addition, a high correlation between metacognitive level and performance in the domain was found.