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How RU? Finding Out When to Help Students

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Advances on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing (3PGCIC 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies ((LNDECT,volume 13))

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Abstract

Understanding how students are feeling can assist Animated Pedagogical Agent (APAs) to provide helpful tailored support. However, eliciting their emotions is difficult. The research examined student’s willingness to disclose their emotional feelings to the APA and whether being asked was disruptive or annoying. Nineteen high school students used a Virtual World (VW) designed to learn scientific inquiry skills. Emulating human behavior, the APA greets students by asking “how are you?” and provides an empathic response. However, students could ignore the empathic conversation and move on to a task-focused conversation. We found that students were willing to disclose both negative and positive emotions to APAs, on average once in every ten times they were asked. Furthermore, students preferred to reveal their emotions when they first met a character rather than in the subsequent meetings and negative feelings became stronger than positive feelings in repeated encounters.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Hedieh Ranjbartabar & Deborah Richards

  2. University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

    Cat Kutay

Authors
  1. Hedieh Ranjbartabar
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  2. Deborah Richards
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  3. Cat Kutay
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Deborah Richards .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

    Fatos Xhafa

  2. Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain

    Santi Caballé

  3. Fukuoka Institute of Technology (FIT), Fukuoka, Japan

    Leonard Barolli

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Ranjbartabar, H., Richards, D., Kutay, C. (2018). How RU? Finding Out When to Help Students. In: Xhafa, F., Caballé, S., Barolli, L. (eds) Advances on P2P, Parallel, Grid, Cloud and Internet Computing. 3PGCIC 2017. Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69835-9_53

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69835-9_53

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69834-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69835-9

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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