Explanatory content and multi-turn dialogues in tutoring

We aim to systematically investigate the effects of ex-planatory content and multi-turn dialogues on learning during tutoring by implementing alternative tutoring regimens in an intelligent tutoring system for a letter se-quence extrapolation task. It is plausible that the power of tutoring resides, in part, in the fact that a tutor can extend right/wrong dis-course moves like "OK " and "are you sure " with ex-planatory content ("this is right/wrong, because..."). In past work, we have proposed a computational theory of learning from information about wrong answers (Ohlsson, 1996). However, some empirical tutoring studies have found an effect of explanatory content, others have not. The effects of explanatory content might depend on the linguistic devices used to communicate it. For example