TY - JOUR
T1 - Virtual tutor and pupil interaction
T2 - A study of empathic feedback as extrinsic motivation for learning
AU - Oker, Ali
AU - Pecune, Florian
AU - Declercq, Christelle
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially performed within the Labex SMART (ANR-11-LABX-65) supported by French state funds managed by the ANR within the “Investissements d’Avenir” program under reference ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02. It has also been partially funded by the French National Research Agency project MaClasse 3.0.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.
PY - 2020/9/1
Y1 - 2020/9/1
N2 - Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children to learn in. However, the question of how they should behave in order to enhance pupils’ motivation remains unanswered. Using an embodied conversational agent platform, we tested human-computer interactions with 22 children aged 9–11 years. Children performed several numeracy exercises set by two different virtual agents. One agent provided solely verbal feedback (unimodal), while the other one combined facial expressions based on real muscle contractions with its verbal feedback (bimodal). Children then completed a perceived social support questionnaire. Qualitative and quantitative data were subjected to inferential statistical tests. Results showed that the overall duration of agent-pupil interactions varied, children found the bimodal agent more empathic, and produced significantly more correct answers. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between accuracy and mean reaction times for correct answers with the bimodal agent. The lack of a correlation for the unimodal agent is discussed in the light of empathy and motivation in social cognition.
AB - Virtual tutors are a promising technology, providing a rich interactive environment for children to learn in. However, the question of how they should behave in order to enhance pupils’ motivation remains unanswered. Using an embodied conversational agent platform, we tested human-computer interactions with 22 children aged 9–11 years. Children performed several numeracy exercises set by two different virtual agents. One agent provided solely verbal feedback (unimodal), while the other one combined facial expressions based on real muscle contractions with its verbal feedback (bimodal). Children then completed a perceived social support questionnaire. Qualitative and quantitative data were subjected to inferential statistical tests. Results showed that the overall duration of agent-pupil interactions varied, children found the bimodal agent more empathic, and produced significantly more correct answers. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between accuracy and mean reaction times for correct answers with the bimodal agent. The lack of a correlation for the unimodal agent is discussed in the light of empathy and motivation in social cognition.
KW - Empathy
KW - Feedback
KW - Learning
KW - Motivation
KW - Virtual agents
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U2 - 10.1007/s10639-020-10123-5
DO - 10.1007/s10639-020-10123-5
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85079413073
SN - 1360-2357
VL - 25
SP - 3643
EP - 3658
JO - Education and Information Technologies
JF - Education and Information Technologies
IS - 5
ER -