Affiliations: Learning Research and Development Center/Computer
Science Department, University of Pittsburgh, 3939 O'Hara St.,
Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. E-mail: litman@cs.pitt.edu | Language Technologies Institute/Human-Computer
Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
E-mail: cprose@cs.cmu.edu | Learning Research and Development Center, University
of Pittsburgh, 3939 O'Hara St., Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
E-mail: forbesk@cs.pitt.edu
Abstract: While human tutors typically interact with students using spoken
dialogue, most computer dialogue tutors are text-based. We have conducted two
experiments comparing typed and spoken tutoring dialogues, one in a human-human
scenario, and another in a human-computer scenario. In both experiments, we
compared spoken versus typed tutoring for learning gains and time on task, and
also measured the correlations of learning gains with dialogue features. Our
main results are that changing the modality from text to speech caused changes
in the learning gains, time and superficial dialogue characteristics of human
tutoring, but for computer tutoring it made less difference.
Keywords: Dialogue, evaluation of AIED systems, intelligent tutoring systems, natural language interfaces for instructional systems, spoken language interface
