Designing Conversational Agents to Support Student Teacher Learning in Virtual Reality Simulation: A Case Study
Chih‐Pu Dai, Fengfeng Ke, Nuodi Zhang, Alex Barrett, Luke West, Saptarshi Bhowmik, Sherry A. Southerland, Xin Yuan
Abstract
Maximizing educational impacts with learning technologies is one of the areas that researchers and practitioners are concerned about in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI). In this case study, we report user experiences and lessons learned of the Enactive Virtual Environment for teaching practice (EVETeach) with AI-powered virtual student agents called Evelyn. We conducted a user study with a case study research design. We collected multiple sources of data from 24 student teachers, including participatory observations, field notes, semi-structured interviews, computer-based conversation logs, audio-, video-, and screen-recordings, and a cognitive walkthrough. We identified the following salient emerging findings as lessons learned: 1) Student teachers value and relate to the teaching practices in virtual reality simulation with AI-powered conversational agents, 2) AI-powered conversational agents inject humor to facilitate situational and social teaching practice, and 3) AI-powered conversational student agents maintain authentic discourse to promote student teachers’ pedagogical reasoning.