Publications
Research on collaborative learning between humans and virtual pedagogical agents represents a necessary extension to recent research on the conceptual, theoretical, methodological, analytical, and educational issues behind co- and socially-shared regulated learning between humans. This study presents a novel coding framework that was developed and used to describe collaborations between learners and a pedagogical agent (PA) during a subgoal setting activity with MetaTutor, an intelligent tutoring system. Learner-PA interactions were examined across two scaffolding conditions: prompt and feedback (PF), and control. Learners' compliance to follow the PA's prompts and feedback in the PF condition were also examined. Results demonstrated that learners followed the PA's prompts and feedback to help them set more appropriate subgoals for their learning session the majority of the time. Descriptive statistics revealed that when subgoals were set collaboratively between learners and the PA, they generally lead to higher proportional learning gains when compared to less collaboratively set goals. Taken together, the results provide preliminary evidence that learners are both willing to engage in and benefit from collaborative interactions with PAs when immediate, directional feedback and the opportunity to try again are provided. Implications and future directions for extending co- and socially-shared regulated learning theories to include learner-PA interactions are proposed.
Emotions play a critical role during learning and problem solving with advanced learning technologies (ALTs). Despite their importance, relatively few attempts have been made to understand learners' emotional monitoring and regulation by using data visualizations of their own (and others') cognitive, affective, metacognitive, and motivational (CAMM) self-regulated learning (SRL) processes to potentially foster their emotion regulation (ER). We present a theoretically based and empirically driven conceptual framework that addresses ER by proposing the use of visualizations of one's own and others' CAMM SRL multichannel data to facilitate learners' monitoring and regulation of emotions during learning with ALTs. We use an example with eye-tracking data to illustrate the mapping between theoretical assumptions, ER strategies, and the types of data visualizations that can enhance learners' ER, including key processes such as emotion flexibility, emotion adaptivity, and emotion efficacy. We conclude with future directions leading to a systematic interdisciplinary research agenda that addresses outstanding ER-related issues by integrating models, theories, methods, and analytical techniques for the cognitive, learning, and affective sciences; human computer interaction (HCI); data visualization; big data; data mining; and SRL.


