Result: The Impact of Batch Deep Reinforcement Learning on Student Performance: A Simple Act of Explanation Can Go a Long Way

While Reinforcement learning (RL), especially Deep RL (DRL), has shown outstanding performance in video games, little evidence has shown that DRL can be successfully applied to human-centric tasks where the ultimate RL goal is to make the "human-agent interactions" productive and fruitful. In real-life, complex, human-centric tasks, such as education and healthcare, data can be noisy and limited. Batch RL is designed for handling such situations where data is "limited yet noisy," and where "building simulations is challenging." In two consecutive empirical studies, we investigated Batch DRL for pedagogical policy induction, to choose student learning activities in an Intelligent Tutoring System. In Fall 2018 (F18), we compared the Batch DRL policy to an Expert policy, but found no significant difference between the DRL and Expert policies. In Spring 2019 (S19), we augmented the Batch DRL-induced policy with "a simple act of explanation" by showing a message such as "The AI agent thinks you should view this problem as a Worked Example to learn how some new rules work.". We compared this policy against two conditions, the Expert policy, and a student decision making policy. Our results show that 1) the Batch DRL policy with explanations significantly improved student learning performance more than the Expert policy; and 2) no significant differences were found between the Expert policy and student decision making. Overall, our results suggest that "pairing simple explanations with the Batch DRL policy" can be an important and effective technique for applying RL to real-life, human-centric tasks.

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