Designing an Adaptive Empathy Learning Tool

Abstract

Empathy is a fundamental competency for daily communication, interaction, and teamwork, and thus most relevant for future jobs. Nevertheless, educational organizations are limited in providing the necessary conditions for students to develop empathy skills, due to traditional large-scale and distance-learning scenarios. In this paper, we present insights on how to design an adaptive learning tool that helps students to develop their ability to react to other people’s observed experiences through individual feedback independent of an instructor, time and location. Based on theoretical insights of 110 papers and 28 user interviews, we propose preliminary design principles for an adaptive empathy learning tool. Moreover, we evaluate the design principles as an instantiated prototype in a proof-of-concept evaluation with 25 students. The results indicate that an empathy learning tool based on the presented design knowledge seems to be a promising approach to help students to improve their empathy skills in different learning scenarios.