Can Automated Emotional Scaffolding Affect Student Persistence? A Baseline Experiment

A 2002 Wizard of Oz study showed that emotional scaffolding provided by a human significantly increased children’s persistence in an automated Reading Tutor, as measured by the number of tasks they chose to undertake. We report a 5,965-trial experiment to test a simple automated form of such scaffolding, compared to a control condition without it. 348 children in grades K-4 spent significantly longer per task in the experimental condition due to a design flaw, yet still averaged equal numbers of tasks in both conditions. We theorize that they subjectively gauged effort in terms of number of tasks rather than number or duration of solution attempts.