While Reinforcement learning (RL), especially Deep RL (DRL), has shown outstanding performance in video games, little evidence has shown that DRL can be successfully applied to human-centric tasks where the ultimate RL goal is to make the "human-agent interactions" productive and fruitful. In real-life, complex, human-centric tasks, such…

In interactive e-learning environments such as Intelligent Tutoring Systems, pedagogical decisions can be made at different levels of granularity. In this work, we focus on making decisions at "two levels": whole problems vs. single steps and explore three types of granularity: "problem-level only" ("Prob-Only"),…

Research has shown assistance can provide many benefits to novices lacking the mental models needed for problem solving in a new domain. However, varying approaches to assistance, such as subgoals and next-step hints, have been implemented with mixed results. Next-Step hints are common in data-driven tutors due to their straightforward generation…

Within intelligent tutoring systems, considerable research has investigated hints, including how to generate data-driven hints, what hint content to present, and when to provide hints for optimal learning outcomes. However, less attention has been paid to "how" hints are presented. In this paper, we propose a new hint delivery mechanism…

Pedagogical strategies are policies for a tutor to decide the next action when there are multiple actions available. When the content is controlled to be the same across experimental conditions, there has been little evidence that tutorial decisions have an impact on students' learning. In this paper, we applied Reinforcement Learning (RL) to…