Explanatory analysis of the manner in which an instructor adaptively organizes skilled motion teaching process

• The paper studies the teaching strategy of a skilled motion for adaptively guiding a learner through verbal advice.
• The advice elements to give are not determined only by the characteristics of the latest motion performance.
• An indirect teaching path is often utilized in the feature variable space rather than a straight path towards the goal.
• Visualizing the teaching process as proposed leads to natural interpretations of the strategy that is actually taken.

Mastering a skilled motion usually requires a step-by-step progression through multiple learning phases with different subgoals. It is not easy for a learner to properly organize such a complex learning process without assistance. Hence, this task is often facilitated interactively by a human instructor through verbal advice. In many cases, the instructor's teaching strategy in relation to decomposing the entire learning process into phases, setting a subgoal for each learning phase, choosing verbal advice to guide the learner toward this subgoal, etc. remains intuitive and has not yet been formally understood. Thus, taking the basic motion of wok handling as an example, this paper presents several concrete teaching processes involving an advice sequence and the corresponding changes in the motion performance in a feature variable space. Thereby, the paper analyzes and represents the actual strategy taken in an easy-to-interpret form. As a result, it confirms that the instructor determines the set of advice elements to be given based, not simply on the observable characteristics of the latest motion performance, but more adaptively upon the interaction history with the learner.Relevance to industryTeaching a skilled motion efficiently is essential in various industrial sectors such as those involving manual assembly. An experienced instructor may adaptively organize the entire interactive process of teaching a learner to accelerate the learning of correct motion skills.