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Resource limitations make it challenging to provide all students with one of the most effec- tive educational interventions: personalized instruction. Reinforcement learning could be a pivotal tool to decrease the development costs and enhance the effectiveness of intelligent tutoring software, that aims to provide the right support, at the right time, to a student. Here we illustrate that deep reinforcement learning can be used to provide adaptive peda- gogical support to students learning about the concept of volume in a narrative storyline software. Using explainable artificial intelligence tools, we extracted interpretable insights about the pedagogical policy learned and demonstrated that the resulting policy had simi- lar performance in a different student population. Most importantly, in both studies, the reinforcement-learning narrative system had the largest benefit for those students with the lowest initial pretest scores, suggesting the opportunity for AI to adapt and provide support for those most in need.