Abstract
Many intelligent tutors are not designed with English language learners (ELL) in mind. As a result, Hispanic ELL students, a large and underserved population in U.S. classrooms, may experience difficulty accessing the relevant tutor content. This research investigates how Hispanic and ELL students perceive the utility of and relate to animated pedagogical agents based on evaluating two theories of learning: students will be more attracted to a learning companion (LC) avatars that matches their personality and will regard a LC as a substitute self-construction. Results indicate that ELL students find LCs more useful and helpful than do Caucasian students and ELL students purposely design LCs that look more like themselves than do the non-ELL students.
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- 1.
Conducted with My Blue Robot (mybluerobot.com) an avatar design application.
- 2.
The term Hispanic refers to the people, nations, and cultures that have a historical link to Spain. ELL refers to a person who does not speak English at home and is learning the English language in addition to their native language.
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Acknowledgement
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) #1324385 IIS/Cyberlearning DIP: Impact of Adaptive Interventions on Student Affect, Performance. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.
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Allessio, D., Woolf, B., Wixon, N., Sullivan, F.R., Tai, M., Arroyo, I. (2018). Ella Me Ayudó (She Helped Me): Supporting Hispanic and English Language Learners in a Math ITS. In: Penstein Rosé, C., et al. Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10948. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93846-2_5
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