Different explanatory dialogue styles and their effects on knowledge acquisition by novices

The knowledge that people recruit and acquire during an explanatory dialogue is important in understanding how these dialogues are successfully carried out and how explanation and learning occur. The aim is to improve explanation provision by intelligent tutoring and knowledge based systems. In this paper an empirical study is described which investigated the effects of different explanatory dialogue styles on the knowledge acquisition by novices. Two dialogue styles were manipulated, `active´ giving strong spontaneous guidance and `passive´, giving weak guidance. The students who participated in the active dialogue style tended to acquire more knowledge than the students in the passive condition. However, providing students with strong guidance was very costly and the most efficient use of expert resources may be to teach students in a passive manner