On the role of politeness in online human–human tutoring

Abstract Researchers have demonstrated that dialogue‐based intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) can be effective in assisting students in learning. However, little research has attempted to explore the necessity of equipping dialogue‐based ITS with one of the most important capabilities of human tutors, that is, maintaining polite interactions with students, which is essential to provide students with a pleasant learning experience. In this study, we examined the role of politeness by analysing a large‐scale real‐world dataset consisting of over 14K online human–human tutorial dialogues. Specifically, we employed linguistic theories of politeness to characterise the politeness levels of tutor–student‐generated utterances, investigated the correlation between the politeness levels of tutors' utterances and students' problem‐solving performance and quantified the power of politeness in predicting students' problem‐solving performance by applying Gradient Tree Boosting. The study results showed that: (i) in the effective tutorial sessions (ie, sessions in which students successfully solved problems), tutors tended to be very polite at the start of a tutorial session and become more direct to guide students as the session progressed; (ii) students with better performance in solving problems tended to be more polite at the beginning and the end of a tutorial session than their counterparts who failed to solve problems; (iii) the correlation between tutors' polite expressions and students' performance was not evident in non‐instructional communication; and (iv) politeness alone cannot adequately reveal students' problem‐solving performance, and thus other factors (eg, sentiment contained in utterances) should also be taken into account. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Human–human tutoring is acknowledged as an effective instructional method. Polite expression can help strengthen the relationship between tutors and students. Polite expression can promote students' learning achievements in many educational contexts. What this paper adds By considering the students' prior progress on a problem‐based learning task, we demonstrated the extent to which tutors and students display politeness in tutoring dialogues. Tutors' polite expressions might not correlate with students' problem‐solving performance in online human–human tutoring dialogues. Politeness alone was insufficient to predict the students' performance. Implications for practice Tutors might consider using words with positive sentiment values to express politeness to students with prior progress, which might encourage those students to make a further effort. The polite strategy of expressing indirect requests could help tutors mitigate the sense of directness, but this strategy should be carefully used in delivering instructional hints, especially for students without prior progress. To better assist students without prior progress, tutors might consider using more direct expression to explicitly guide students.