Transferring Teaching to Testing - An Unexplored Aspect of Teachable Agents

The present study examined whether social motivational influence from working with a Teachable Agent (TA) might transfer from the formative learning phase to a summative test situation. Forty-nine students (9-10 years old) performed a digital pretest of math skills, then played a TA-based educational math game in school over a period of seven weeks. Thereafter, the students were divided into two groups matched according to their pretest scores, and randomly assigned one of two posttest conditions: either with the TA present, or without the TA. Results showed that low-performers on the pretest improved dramatically on the posttest when tested with the TA, whereas highperformers did not. We reason that low-performers might be more susceptible to a supportive social context – as provided by their TA – for performing well in a test situation. Ratings of fun, effort and confidence in taking the test pointed to a complexity of effects for future research.