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Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

We analyze the efficiency and effectiveness of task choice in the context of a reading tutor that listens to children read aloud. We define efficiency as the time to pick a story, and effectiveness in terms of exposing students to new material. We describe design features we added to improve the Reading Tutor's efficiency and effectiveness, and evaluate the resulting systems quantitatively, as follows. First, we designed and implemented a child-friendly menu with two improvements over previous versions: the new menu spoke all items on the list to support use by nonreaders, and required just one click to select an item. Second, we combined this child-friendly menu with a mixed-initiative story choice policy where the Reading Tutor and the student took turns choosing stories. These improvements resulted in measurably more efficient and effective story choice over previous versions.

Notes

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Project LISTEN

Associated Project(s): Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor

Note: in revision

Text Reference

Gregory Aist and Jack Mostow, "Balancing Learner and Tutor Control by Taking Turns: Faster and Better Mixed-Initiative Task Choice in a Reading Tutor that Listens," Speech Technology for Language Learning, Philippe DeCloque and Melissa Holland, ed., Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, 2001

BibTeX Reference

@incollection{Aist_2001_3665,
   author = "Gregory Aist and Jack Mostow",
   editor = "Philippe DeCloque and Melissa Holland",
   title = "Balancing Learner and Tutor Control by Taking Turns: Faster and Better Mixed-Initiative Task Choice in a Reading Tutor that Listens",
   booktitle = "Speech Technology for Language Learning",
   publisher = "Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers",
   address = "The Netherlands",
   year = "2001",
   Notes = "in revision"
}

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