Conversational agents for fostering curiosity-driven learning in children

Curiosity is an important factor that favors independent and individualized learning in children. Research suggests it also a competence can be fostered by training specific metacognitive skills information-searching behaviors. In this light, we develop conversational agent helps children generate curiosity-driven questions, encourages their use to lead autonomous explorations gain new knowledge. The study was conducted with 51 primary school students who interacted either neutral or incentive helped questioning offering semantic cues. Results showed significant increase the number quality of questions generated agent. This interaction resulted longer stronger progress. Together, our results suggest more able train children's curiosity-related skills, better they maintain behaviors knowledge are likely acquire.