Design and Evaluation of an Adaptive Empathy Learning Tool

Abstract

Empathy is an elementary skill for daily interactions and for professional communication, agile teamwork and successful leadership and thus elementary for educational curricula. However, educational organizations face difficulties in providing the boundary conditions necessary for their students to develop empathy skills due to the lack of individual support in traditional large-scale and growing distance-learning scenarios. Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we propose an adaptive empathy learning tool that helps students develop their ability to react to other people's observed experiences through individual feedback in large-scale or distance learning scenarios. Based on a design science research project, we propose a set of design principles and instantiate and evaluate them with our prototype Eva in an online experiment with 65 students. The findings suggest that an adaptive empathy learning tool that follows our design principles is a promising approach to individually support students in their ability to react to other people's observed abilities in traditional learning scenarios.

ArgueTutor: An Adaptive Dialog-Based Learning System for Argumentation Skills

“…To the best of our knowledge, this study is one of the frst to present empirical insights into how to design a dialog-based learning tool to foster argumentation skills of students based on adaptive and intelligent tutoring. It provides a foundation for researchers who also aim to develop learning tools to train metacognition skills to compare their solution with ours (e.g., for empathy skills [77]). Educators can now use our design fndings and principles to build their own adaptive PCAs to support argumentation learning in their large-scale or distance-learning scenarios.…”

Empathic pedagogical conversational agents: A systematic literature review

“…Wambsganss et al. (2021) find that the design principles of chatbot feedback have a positive impact on student perceptions. The design principles are listed in Table 5.…”

“…First, five sets of design principles for empathic PCAs were found in the review (Ayedoun et al., 2020; Jimenez et al., 2018; Kumar, 2021; Santos et al., 2020; Wambsganss et al., 2021). Each has its particularities.…”

“…These are the transversality of empathic abilities (ie, the presence of this design principle in all agents), the promotion of dialogic learning (communication and learning), proficiency in the field of knowledge and personalized feedback according to the student's level. Furthermore, two reports mention that the reliability of the environment and user experience are also principles to consider in the design (Kumar, 2021; Wambsganss et al., 2021).…”

“…Third, the research design preferred by researchers is experimenting with empathic PCA implementation. In this case, the quantitative approach is predominant (see Table 6), although four studies utilized mixed method designs for a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of the learning tool (Kumar, 2021; Liu et al., 2022; Santos et al., 2020; Wambsganss et al., 2021). These have chatbots as conversational agent types.…”