Social motivation in virtual learning environments

Learning “in real life” is, arguably, always connected to some form of social interaction or communicative purpose with other human beings. This has led many educational researchers to consider learning an essentially social activity. But how can we capture the qualities of learning when students sit to learn on their own, in front of a computer?

As a Ph.D. student I am a member of an interdisciplinary research group that is developing an educational game in mathematics for elementary school children. A specific extension in this game consists of a pedagogical virtual agent, that is, a computer-steered character with whom one can communicate, and which is controlled by an underlying artificial intelligence. The basic pedagogical idea stems from the principle of learning by teaching, such that the student can train the agent on learning tasks in the game. This kind of agents have been used successfully in other digital learning environments and are then referred to as teachable agents.

A key task in my present project concerns developing the teachable agent as a social actor. This means that one, besides training the agent on math questions, also should be able to chat with it about different topics, more or less related to mathematics. In addition we are working on different visual representations of the agent (e.g. gender and style) in order to deal with social expectations on its character. The rationale is that social relationship-building promotes learning och performance in several ways, even when it refers to a non-human entity. Previous studies have shown that virtual agents employed in a proper way can affect for example students' motivation and engagement, as well as their responsibility-taking and self-efficacy. This is especially important for mathematics, which is often 'dramatized' in school.