An empirical analysis of factors influencing student-tutor dialogue

Dialogue is a key element in education, commonly used to provide feedback. Although the benefits of the dialogue in different learning contexts, dialogue is affected by several factors such as the interest of student in the topic, tutor's affective attitude to student, student's self-esteem and in some cases when the student is intimidated by peers. On the other hand, the trend of education is distance learning through computational tools. For that reason, analyze some real problems in student-tutor interaction and design a solution using technology will be potential research line. The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the problems in the dialogue process in learning. First we identified the factors that affect the student-tutor dialogue and we design a research framework for survey analysis. Then, we applied questionnaires survey to approximately 100 students in Mexico to determine the impacts of these factors. Also, we presented a Chi Square statistical analysis of these results. The analysis shows that affectivity from the tutor motivates the students to dialogue with the tutor and student's personality, easiness of a topic and classmates causes lack of dialogue. Findings from this research will serve as a useful reference for the design of dialogue modules for learning systems. Finally, we introducing a dialogue conceptual model as a solution to these factors using computational tools.