L’analyse de composants émotionnels dans des stratégies d’apprentissage

A number of educational theories have been established for over 20 years. They use the learner’s reactions in a learning situation, but no educational theory could fully describe an educational process taking into account all the emotional reactions of a learner. We want to integrate the learner’s emotions in these learning processes, as they are important in the mechanisms of learning and memory. Recently we saw that emotional factor is considered to play an important role in cognitive processes. Modeling a learner’s emotional reactions during the learning process is a novelty for an Intelligent Tutorial System. To achieve our research, we will examine educational theories which did not consider the learner’s emotions. Until now, no Intelligent Tutorial System for teaching has incorporated the concept of emotional factor of a human learner. Our first objective is to analyze a few strategies and detect emotional components that may be there or not. We seek to determine what type of teaching method is used, in other words, what the tutor is doing to predict and assist the learner to accomplish his/her learning task under optimal conditions. The second objective is to improve these methods by adding the emotional factors. They are so called “emotional methods”. The final objective is to test the model of an improved educational theory by adding the emotional factors. As part of this research we analyze a number of educational theories, including theories of Robert Gagné, Jerome Bruner, Herbert J. Klausmeier and David Merrill, in seeking to identify the emotional components. No educational theory has focused on emotions during the learning process. These educational theories are developed taking into account several factors that can influence the learning process. We propose an approach based on emotion prediction that is linked to potential causes triggered by different factors in the learning process. We want to develop a technique that allows the tutor to deal with the learner’s emotional reaction at any given time during the learning process and to include it in a teaching method. To achieve the second objective of our research, we use a learning tutor model based on the principle of educating the learner’s emotions, model which first seeks the person’s personality and second the person's knowledge. If we know the learner’s personality, we can predict his/her emotional reactions (positive or negative) and we can ensure the proper disposal of the learner, his cooperation, communication and optimism necessary to resolve emotional problems. In order to achieve the third objective, we propose a technique that allows the tutor to solve an emotional reaction problem of the learner at a given moment during the learning process. We apply this technique to an educational theory. For this first theory, we study the effect of certain educational strategies of a virtual tutor about the learner’s emotional state, and to this end, we develop an online data structure with which a virtual tutor can induce positive emotions to the learner. We analyze the experimental results using the first theory and then we compare them with three other theories proposed for study. In doing so, we reach the third objective of our research, which is to test an educational theory model and then compare it with other theories in order to develop or improve the emotional methods. We analyze the advantages, but also the shortcomings of these theories compared to a learner’s emotional behaviour. In conclusion, we will keep the best educational theories or we will suggest a way to improve them.

Keyphrases: Intelligent Tutorial System, computational model of emotions, predictions of emotional reactions, supervised learning, intervention method