A Framework to Induce Self-Regulation Through a Metacognitive Tutor

A new architectural framework for a metacognitive tutoring system is presented that is aimed to stimulate self regulatory behavior in the learner. The new framework extends the cognitive architecture of TutorJ that has been already proposed by some of the authors. TutorJ relies mainly on dialogic interaction with the user, and makes use of a statistical dialogue planner implemented through a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). A suitable two-level structure has been designed for the statistical reasoner to cope with measuring and stimulating metacognitive skills in the user. Suitable actions have been designed to this purpose starting from the analysis of the main question- naires proposed in the literature. Our reasoner has been designed to model the relation between each item in a questionnaire and the related metacognitive skill, so the proper action can be selected by the tutoring agent. The complete framework is detailed, the reasoner structure is discussed, and a simple application scenario is presented.