Virtual Tutees

Teachable Agents

Teachable agents, a new way of using pedagogical agents, were developed in 1990s by Gautam Biswas with the Teachable Agent Group at Vanderbilt University. [Page 821]Teachable agents are computer-simulated tutees that K–12 students teach about an assigned content such as river ecology. Since its first development, numerous studies have used teachable agents. Reported benefits include students’ increased responsibility for their own learning and improved reflection on acquired knowledge. The impact of teachable agents on student learning has been mostly positive, but there have also been limitations. For the most part, the use of teachable agents has been confined to K–12 educational settings. In addition, although research on teachable agents has indicated positive effects on student motivation and engagement, the theoretical foundations and relevant design principles that informed design were not explicitly discussed nor established empirically.

The Virtual Tutee System

More recently, Seung Won Park and ChanMin Kim developed the Virtual Tutee System (VTS) to engage college students in academic reading. The VTS is a Web-based environment in which students teach virtual tutees about required course readings. VTS design is grounded in role theory and self-determination theory. These theories give logical explanations for the effects of learning-by-teaching that are often found with the use of virtual tutees. The goal of the VTS is to promote students’ active engagement and learning by nurturing their feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness through taking the role of tutor.

Learning by Teaching

The use of virtual tutees to facilitate the effects of learning by teaching emerged from peer tutoring, which has been used in education to enhance the learning and performance of both tutors and tutees. The benefits of being a tutor are often highlighted because they include improvements in academic achievement and in engagement, and attitudes. The student role of tutor has been applied to both teachable agents and the VTS, in which all students are tutors and all virtual characters are tutees; thus, the challenge of assigning students to tutor or tutee roles is avoided.

Computers Are Social Actors (CASA)

The human-computer interaction research referred to as computers are social actors (CASA) explains that people interact with computers as they do with other humans. That is, social expectations and behaviors used among people are applied in interactions with computers. Many pedagogical agent studies employed CASA in an attempt to create social presence. Users interacting with computer characters, avatars, and agents exhibit social behaviors and attitudes toward them. For example, when asked to evaluate pedagogical agents, participants comment on human characteristics such as politeness, friendliness, and trustworthiness. In research on and development of both teachable agents and the VTS, CASA was used to present virtual tutees as social beings so that student tutors would perceive their role of teaching as authentic and would interact with virtual tutees in social ways.

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