The Role of Initiative in Tutorial Dialogue

This work is the first systematic investigation of initiative in human-human tutorial dialogue. We studied initiative management in two dialogue strategies: didactic tutoring and Socratic tutoring. We hypothesized that didactic tutoring would be mostly tutor-initiative while Socratic tutoring would be mixed-initiative, and that more student initiative would lead to more learning (i.e., task success for the tutor). Surprisingly, students had initiative more of the time in the didactic dialogues (21% of the turns) than in the Socratic dialogues (10% of the turns), and there was no direct relationship between student initiative and learning. However, Socratic dialogues were more interactive than didactic dialogues as measured by percentage of tutor utterances that were questions and percentage of words in the dialogue uttered by the student, and interactivity had a positive correlation with learning.