Enhancing learning with off-task social dialogues

Abstract

In Peoplia, a socially intelligent tutoring agent helps students learn by augmenting learning opportunities with social features. The tutoring agent engages in off-task conversations with the students before and after the instructional activities, motivating them to work with the system more successfully. We describe the tutor's architecture and early experiments in the domain of middle school mathematics. Students who engaged with the socially intelligent agent liked the system more, and attained higher learning gains. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.