Adapting performance and emotional support feedback to cultural differences

Abstract

This paper investigates adaptation of feedback to learners' cultural backgrounds. First, we investigate how to portray the cultural background of a learner. Second, we present a qualitative focus-group study, investigating how participants from different cultures believe culture affects the kind of feedback given to a learner. Finally, we present an empirical study on how humans adapt feedback based on the cultural background of learners to inspire an algorithm. Our investigations resulted in a set of stories which can be used to reliably portray a person's culture when investigating cultural adaptation in indirect experiments and user as wizard studies. They also provided insights into the adaptations people make to cultural differences.