Regulative Loops, Step Loops and Task Loops

This commentary suggests a generalization of the conception of the behavior of tutoring systems, which the target article characterized as having an outer loop that was executed once per task and an inner loop that was executed once per step of the task. A more general conception sees these two loops as instances of regulative loops, which repeatedly compare students' performances to a gold standard and give advice on how to bring that performance closer to the standard. © 2015 International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society.