Detecting the Learner's Motivational States in An Interactive Learning Environment

It is important for pedagogical agents to have the ability to detect the learner's motivational states. With this ability, agents will be more sensitive to the cognitive and emotional states of the learner and be able to promote the learner's motivation through interaction with the learner. In this paper we present a method for agents to assess learner's motivational states in an interactive learning environment. It takes into account the learner's attention, current task and expected time to perform the task. An experiment was conducted to collect data for evaluating the performance of the method, and the results showed that there is more than 75% to detect the learner's motivational states where intervention is warranted.