A Generic Tool to Browse Tutor-Student Interactions: Time Will Tell!

A basic question in mining data from an intelligent tutoring system is, “What happened when…?” A generic tool to answer such questions should let the user specify which phenomenon to explore; explore selected events and the context in which they occurred; and require minimal effort to adapt the tool to new versions, to new users, or to other tutors. We describe an implemented tool and how it meets these requirements. The tool applies to MySQL databases whose representation of tutorial events includes student, computer, start time, and end time. It infers the implicit hierarchical structure of tutorial interaction so humans can browse it. A companion paper [1] illustrates the use of this tool to explore data from Project LISTEN's automated Reading Tutor.