Social Facilitation Effects by Pedagogical Conversational Agent: Lexical Network Analysis in an Online Explanation Task

The present study investigates web-based learning activities of undergraduate students who generate explanations about a key concept taught in a large-scale classroom. The present study used an online system with Pedagogical Conversational Agent (PCA), asked to explain about the key concept from different points and provided suggestions and requests about how to make explanations, and gave social facilitation prompts such as providing examples by other members in the classroom. A total of 314 learner's text based explanation activities were collected from three different classrooms and were analyzed using the social network analysis methods. The main results from the lexical analysis show that those using the PCAs with social feedback worked harder to use more various types of explanations than those without such feedback. Future directions on how to design online tutoring systems are discussed.