Conversational Agent to Promote Students´ Productive Talk: The Effect of Solicited vs. Unsolicited Agent Intervention

Recent research has provided evidence that conversational agents can effectively be used to trigger and scaffold peer discource in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) settings. In this study, we use a prototype conversational agent system named Mentor Chat to explore the impact of two different intervention modes on inducing beneficial students´ interactions, following the Academically Productive Talk (APT) perspective. We analyze the effects of (a) unsolicited agent interventions, which are automatically initiated and displayed by the agent, as compared to (b) solicited agent interventions, which are initiated automatically but only displayed upon students´ request. The outcomes indicate that an unsolicited intervention mode can be more effective than a solicited one by means of increasing the level of explicit reasoning displayed in students´ dialogues.