Tutoring: Hint Display

The text within the "Hint Display" box will be displayed by AutoTutor when a student appears to be attempting to answer a specific expectation. Hints are provided to students when they do not fully answer an expectation (i.e., % total coverage of semantic answer).

The hints

For each expectation, 4 hints need to be provided to help guide the user to fully covering the content in each expectation. AutoTutor Lite will automatically detect which expectation the user is trying to answer. For this reason, it is best if your expectations have as little semantic overlap as possible. This way AutoTutor Lite can provide relevant hints to the user in real time.

Ideally, your hints will guide the user to the correct answer without explicitly stating the answer.

Let's consider the question, "What makes a good hint?"

A hint is an utterance made by the tutor that explicitly attempts to guide the learner in the retrieval of knowledge or in drawing a correct inference. There are three types of commonly used hints that you might want to consider. They are listed below along with generic examples.

1. Information conveyance hints

Explicit statements to get the learner to retrieve or infer knowledge
Example: How would a change in X impact Y?

2. Pointing hints

Implicit hints that provide context to try to elicit the response from the user
Example:Think about what else you could add, think about the relationship between X and Y.

3. Directed reasoning hints

These tend to be a series of questions that guide the learner to think through the process of getting the answer.
Example: So, what happened first? This lead to what? Which caused what to happen? So, can you summarize the process for me?

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