Collaborative Dialogue Agent for Peer Learning Interactions
andes3.lrdc.pitt.edu/PaL/
Summary
This project has three goals:
elucidate our understanding of peer learning, by analyzing what constitutes effective knowledge sharing and effective explanations
devise a computational model of peer learning interactions, and embody it by building an artificial peer dialogue agent contribute to Computer Science education by developing the peer dialogue agent in the domain of basic data structures and algorithms, and pushing students to develop abstract, generalizable knowledge about data structures and algorithms.
The dialogue agent will provide a vehicle for studying different strategies to support and assess peer learning. The development of the dialogue agent will be informed by a detailed language analysis of peer interactions that the project will collect. The dialogue agent will use natural language processing technology, but to avoid the possibly confounding effects of imperfect natural language understanding and generation, the experiments will include a human interpreter who will review and correct as necessary the system's interpretation of the student's inputs and the system's replies back to the student.
By first using the dialogue agent, KSC-PaL, (KSC stands for Knowledge Sharing and Construction) as a peer in computer science education, we hope to increase retention in undergraduate computer science programs, especially among female students. Peer collaboration on programming tasks in classrooms and laboratory settings has been shown to benefit students of both genders.
This project is a collaboration between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Pittsburgh.
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