Zac Imel and Eric Poitras receive College of Ed Grant

Computer Assisted Collaborative Learning Environment for Mental Health Counseling

Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) may be defined as any computer-based learning environment that customizes instruction based on students’ needs, interests, and mastery of a topic. ITS have captured considerable attention and gained increasing recognition as effective instructional tools because of their potential to have a positive effect on learning. While much progress has been made in psychotherapy training to deliver timely, useful, and constructive feedback, there is a pressing need for scalable and automated solutions that facilitate mentoring of novices with expert therapists. Recent advances in natural dialogue processing algorithms has led to innovative solutions to the problem of analyzing written dialogue at large scales and classify utterances. This project aims to develop and evaluate an ITS that leverages natural language processing algorithms for automated formative feedback to promote skill acquisition in a collaborative learning environment in the domain of mental health counseling.