Learning By Teaching: A New Agent Paradigm For Educational Software

This paper discusses Betty’s Brain, a teachable agent in the domain of river ecosystems that combines learning by teaching with self-regulation mentoring to promote deep learning and understanding. Two studies demonstrate the effectiveness of this system. The first study focused on components that define student-teacher interactions in the learning by teaching task. The second study examined the value of adding meta-cognitive strategies that governed Betty’s behavior and self-regulation hints provided by a mentor agent. The study compared three versions: a system where the student was tutored by a pedagogical agent (ITS), a learning by teaching system (LBT) , where students taught a baseline version of Betty, and received tutoring help from the mentor, and a learning by teaching system (SRL), where Betty was enhanced to include self-regulation strategies, and the mentor provided help on domain material plus how to become better learners and better teachers. Results indicate that the addition of the self-regulated Betty and the self-regulation mentor better prepared students to learn new concepts later, even when they no longer had access to the SRL environment. 4 TAG-V: The Teachable Agents Group at Vanderbilt: Members of this group who contributed to this work include Joan Davis, Kadira Belynne, Karun Viswanath, John Bransford, and Thomas Katzlberger.