Literature Driven Method for Modeling Frustration in an ITS

In Intelligent Tutoring Systems, affect-based computing is an important research area. Common approaches to deal with the affective state identification are based on input data from external sensors such as eye-tracker and EEG, as well as methods based on mining of ITS log data. Sensor based methods are viable in laboratory settings but they are tough to implement in real-world scenario which might cater to a large number of students. In our research, we create a mathematical model of frustration based on its theoretical definition. We identify the variables in the model by applying the theoretical definition of frustration to the ITS log data. This approach is different from existing data mining techniques, which use correlation analysis with labeled data. We apply our model to Mindspark, a commercial maths Intelligent Tutoring System, used by several thousand students. We validate our model with human observations of frustration.