Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

By student initiatives we mean productions which the student could reasonably expect to modify the course of the tutorial dialog;ue. Asking a question is one kind of student initiative. This paper describes a system called CircSim-Tutor which we are building, the background of the project, the 28 hour-long tutoring sessions jmalyzed in this paper, and the analysis done. It compares our work to previous work, gives a classification of the student initiatives found and of the tutor's responses to them, and discusses some examples.