Customização da Regulação Emocional de acordo com a Personalidade dos Estudantes em Sistemas Tutores Inteligentes

Emotions influence cognitive processes and are essential during learning. Some emotions can negatively affect learning, as frustration and boredom; others, such as engagement, can positively affect. On the other hand, confusion can influence either negatively or positively. When students experience confusion, they may feel encouraged to seek their knowledge through focus and attention on the activity, resulting in a positive impact on learning. However, when they feel it for an extended period and cannot deal with it, the confusion can generate a cognitive overload on the students and increases the chances of the student to reject the subject that is being learned. Besides, the students’ personality and their previous knowledge on the subject influence the time they can deal with confusion. Therefore, the confusion must be regulated to maximize learning, promoting a more significant engagement and preventing the abandonment of the exercise or content. The problem investigated by this work is how and when an Intelligent Tutoring System could support the regulation of confusion when felt for an extended period by a student. For this purpose, we developed an algorithm to support the choice of multimedia elements (video, figure, or text) to regulate confusion. The choice of the elements considers the student’s personality traits and previous knowledge on the subject. To evaluate our algorithm, we have conducted an experiment with students (N=111) from elementary and higher education from two schools and a college for three months. We analyzed the algorithm’s capacity to influence the regulation of confusion during first-degree equations solving in an Intelligent Tutoring System (PAT2Math) in subjects with extroversion and neuroticism personalities. The results show that the students who used the PAT2Math with our confusion regulation algorithm (experimental group) made fewer mistakes and solved the exercises more quickly than students who have not received any assistance regarding confusion regulation. The results indicate that the system would be regulating the confusion or negative emotions that happens after it.