Spoken versus typed human and computer dialogue tutoring

While human tutors typically interact with students using spoken dialogue, most computer dialogue tutors are text-based. We have conducted 2 experiments comparing typed and spoken tutoring dialogues, one in a human-human scenario, and another in a human-computer scenario. In both experiments, we compared spoken versus typed tutoring for learning gains and time on task, and also measured the correlations of learning gains with dialogue features. Our main results are that changing the modality from text to speech caused large differences in the learning gains, time and superficial dialogue characteristics of human tutoring, but for computer tutoring it made less difference.