Investigating the Impact of Personality and Cognitive Efficiency on the Selection of Exercises for Learners

Abstract

Adapting to learner characteristics is essential when selecting exercises for learners. This paper investigates how humans adapt next exercise selection to learner personality and invested mental effort to enable a future Intelligent Tutoring System to use these adaptations. Participants were presented with validated stories of a learner`s personality at polarised levels, a validated story conveying the mental effort invested in carrying out a given task and an indication of a previous performance (just passing) at a simple arithmetic exercise. Participants were also shown a selection of validated exercises of varying difficulty levels and asked to select the exercise which they thought the learner should do next. We found that overall more difficult exercises were selected for learners who used little effort than for learners who used more effort. We found that although an exercise of slightly harder difficulty remains the most popular choice in the high and low self-esteem conditions, for low self-esteem, participants picked an exercise of lower or the same difficulty more often than in the high condition.