Toward Combining Individual And Collaborative Learning Within An Intelligent Tutoring System

Collaborative and individual learning appear to have complementary strengths; however, the best way to combine these learning methods is still unclear. While previous work has demonstrated the effectiveness of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) for individual learning, collaborative learning with ITSs is much less frequent - especially for young students. In this paper, we discuss our prior and future work with elementary school students that aims to investigate how to best combine individual and collaborative learning using their complementary strengths within an ITS. Our previous findings demonstrate that ITSs are able to support collaboration, as well as individual learning, for this population. In addition, we propose future research to understand how to best combine individual and collaborative learning within an ITS.