Conversational Agents for Learning: How the Agent Role Affects Student Communication

Abstract

Conversational pedagogical agents guide and scaffold student dialogue using natural language both in individual and collaborative learning settings. Although conversational agents have been developed to meet a wide variety of educational needs, there are still open research questions concerning the effective design of the agents. This chapter presents the results of an experimental collaborative learning activity exploring whether the different agent roles (peer or tutor) may affect the students’ perceptions of the agent or their conversational style in their responses to it. The study findings provide valuable insights into how the different agent appearance and communication styles can have an impact on the degree of formality in students’ utterances.