Helping Agents in VMT

In this chapter we describe ongoing work towards enabling dynamic support for collaborative learning in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) environment using state-of-the-art language technologies such as text classification and dialogue agents. The key research goal of our long-term partnership is to experimentally learn broadly applicable principles for supporting effective collaborative problem solving by using these technologies to elicit behavior such as reflection, help seeking, and help provision, which are productive for student learning in diverse groups. Our work so far has yielded an integrated system that makes technology for dynamic collaborative learning support—which has proved effective in earlier lab and classroom studies— available for experimental use within the “wild” VMT environment.