Building a Reinforcement Learning Environment from Limited Data to Optimize Teachable Robot Interventions

International Educational Data Mining Society. e-mail: admin@educationaldatamining.org; Web site: https://educationaldatamining.org/conferences/

Y

13

National Science Foundation (NSF)

2024645

Robotics; Cooperative Learning; Artificial Intelligence; Training; Reinforcement; Undergraduate Students; Student Attitudes; Simulation

Working collaboratively in groups can positively impact performance and student engagement. Intelligent social agents can provide a source of personalized support for students, and their benefits likely extend to collaborative settings, but it is difficult to determine how these agents should interact with students. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers an opportunity for adapting the interactions between the social agent and the students to better support collaboration and learning. However, using RL in education with social agents typically involves training using real students. In this work, we train an RL agent in a high-quality simulated environment to learn how to improve students' collaboration. Data was collected during a pilot study with dyads of students who worked together to tutor an intelligent teachable robot. We explore the process of building an environment from the data, training a policy, and the impact of the policy on different students, compared to various baselines. [For the full proceedings, see ED623995.]

As Provided

2022

ED624059