Abstract
Understanding how children perceive and interact with teachable agents (systems where children learn through teaching a synthetic character embedded in an intelligent tutoring system) can provide insight into the effects of social interaction on learning with intelligent tutoring systems. We describe results from a think-aloud study where children were instructed to narrate their experience teaching Stacy, an agent who can learn to solve linear equations with the student’s help. We found treating her as a partner, primarily through aligning oneself with Stacy using pronouns like you or we rather than she or it significantly correlates with student learning, as do playful face-threatening comments such as teasing, while elaborate explanations of Stacy’s behavior in the third-person and formal tutoring statements reduce learning gains. Additionally, we found that the agent’s mistakes were a significant predictor for students shifting away from alignment with the agent
Contents
1. INTRODUCTION
2. RELATED WORK
3. HYPOTHESES
4. SIMSTUDENT DESCRIPTION
5. STUDY
6. DIALOGUE BEHAVIORS AND LEARNING GAINS
7. ALIGNMENT SHIFT PREDICTION
8. BEHAVIOR SHIFTS ACROSS SESSIONS
9. DISCUSSION
10. CONCLUSION