Brick by brick: iterating interventions to bridge the achievement gap with virtual peers

We lay out one strand of a continuing investigation into the development of a virtual peer to help children learn to use “school English” and “school-ratified science talk”. In this paper we describe a detailed analysis of a corpus of childchild language use, and report our findings on the ways children shift dialects and ways of discussing science depending on the social context and task. We discuss the implications of these results for the re-design of a virtual peer that can evoke language behaviors associated with student achievement. Furthermore, our results allow us to describe the ways in which this virtual agent can tailor its level of interaction based on a child’s current aptitude in this area. Author Keywords embodied conversational agent, virtual peer, African American English, dialect, quantitative methods ACM Classification Keywords H.5.1 Information Interfaces and Presentation: Multimedia Information Systems

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Emilee Rader, Margaret Echelbarger, Justine Cassell
• Keywords: CHI 2011, Conversational Agent, English Dialect, Human Computer Interaction, Multimedia Information Systems