“Mind” TS: Testing a Brief Mindfulness Intervention with an Intelligent Tutoring System

• Published in: Artificial Intelligence in Education pp. 176 - 181
• Main Authors: Krasich, Kristina, Hutt, Stephen, Mills, Caitlin, Spann, Catherine A., Brockmole, James R., D’Mello, Sidney K.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Intelligent tutoring systems; Learning; Mind wandering; Mindfulness
• ISBN: 3319938452; 9783319938455
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-93846-2_32

Attention is critical for learning, but difficult to sustain. Here, we investigated the possibility of integrating a short mindfulness exercise into an ITS to reduce mind wandering (MW)—an attentional shift from task-relevant to task-irrelevant thoughts—and improve learning. Participants were randomly assigned to engage with a 5-min auditory mindfulness exercise (experimental group), a relaxation exercise (active control group), or nothing (control group) before completing a 20-min (SD = 5.77) learning session from GuruTutor, a conversational biology ITS. Participants self-reported MW in response to pseudo-random thought probes during learning and completed pre- and posttest assessments that measured learning. On average, participants reported MW on 25% (SD = 20%) of probes, but there was no evidence that MW rates or learning varied across conditions. Our findings suggest that integrating this mindfulness exercise did not improve attention or learning within the ITS.