Interacting with educational chatbots: A systematic review

Abstract

Chatbots hold the promise of revolutionizing education by engaging learners, personalizing learning activities, supporting educators, and developing deep insight into learners’ behavior. However, there is a lack of studies that analyze the recent evidence-based chatbot-learner interaction design techniques applied in education. This study presents a systematic review of 36 papers to understand, compare, and reflect on recent attempts to utilize chatbots in education using seven dimensions: educational field, platform, design principles, the role of chatbots, interaction styles, evidence, and limitations. The results show that the chatbots were mainly designed on a web platform to teach computer science, language, general education, and a few other fields such as engineering and mathematics. Further, more than half of the chatbots were used as teaching agents, while more than a third were peer agents. Most of the chatbots used a predetermined conversational path, and more than a quarter utilized a personalized learning approach that catered to students’ learning needs, while other chatbots used experiential and collaborative learning besides other design principles. Moreover, more than a third of the chatbots were evaluated with experiments, and the results primarily point to improved learning and subjective satisfaction. Challenges and limitations include inadequate or insufficient dataset training and a lack of reliance on usability heuristics. Future studies should explore the effect of chatbot personality and localization on subjective satisfaction and learning effectiveness.

Personalized Gamification for Learning: A Reactive Chatbot Architecture Proposal

“…The literature on chatbots in education and games for learning is limited. There are few studies on gamification and conversational AI in education [ 46 ]. For example, Lin et al [ 36 ] related a platform for collecting, evaluating, and annotating human–chatbot interactions.…”

The implementation of chatbot-mediated immediacy for synchronous communication in an online chemistry course

“…The application of QA systems through the use of chatbots has been well documented in the educational sphere (Kuhail et al, 2022 ), with many specific features identified as being crucial to how students learn. An important function that educational chatbots should possess is the ability to scaffold the learning of an individual (Kim et al, 2022a ) by teaching them a certain topic or concept step-by-step, slowly building competency until a student is able to reach an acceptable level of mastery (Gazulla et al, 2022 ).…”

“…This chatbot would be able to provide a customisable visualisation of the students’ engagement statistics on the platform, allowing students to better organize their study sessions. Finally, another useful function that chatbots possess for education is the ability to read human affect, and potentially modify emotional states through empathetic responses (Kuhail et al, 2022 ). Words of encouragement, affirmation, or even motivational quotes, benefit students’ learning process due to the integral link between emotions and educational cognition (Hasan et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Despite XiaoIce’s (and other chatbots’) success, the emotional bond and humanness of many other educational chatbot QA systems generally lack consistency (Smutny & Schreiberova, 2020 ), in addition to the overall scarcity of studies on affective focused chatbots (Kuhail et al, 2022 ). As communication immediacy closes the student–teacher gap by building rapport, one potential unexplored area would concern the ability of a communication immediacy chatbot to be affective.…”

Chatbots Generativos como Ferramentas de Apoio ao Ensino em Cursos na Área de Ferrovias

“…O uso de sistemas de conversac ¸ão tem se tornado cada vez mais popular devido ao seu potencial em simular diálogos humanos, possibilitando assim automatizar tarefas e reduzir custos [Kuhail et al 2022]. Existem diversos exemplos de aplicac ¸ões de chatbots em vários domínios, incluindo saúde [Chang et al 2022], servic ¸os ao consumidor [Misischia et al 2022], educac ¸ão [Oliveira et al 2010, Mondal et al 2018], entre outros.…”