Social Emotional Learning with Conversational Agents

Abstract

Social emotional skills are foundational competencies upon which children draw throughout their lives. This work investigates current, commercially available experiences for social emotional learning (SEL) through conversational agents (CAs). Specifically, we reviewed 3,767 Skills available in the "Kids" category of the Alexa Skills Marketplace and found 42 working Skills with connections to SEL. We found that the most common scenarios these Skills sought to support were: active listening, emotional wellbeing, conversation with other people, and politeness. The interaction patterns used by these Skills distilled into a taxonomy of styles we labeled: The Delegator, The Lecturer, The Bulldozer, and The One-Track Mind. We found that, collectively, these Skills provide shallow experiences and lack contingent feedback. To examine the gap between current offerings and families' needs, we also conducted 26 interviews with parents to probe parents' ideas about CAs supporting children's SEL. Parents see potential for CAs to support children in four concrete ways, including attuning to others, cultivating curiosity, reinforcing politeness, and developing emotional awareness. Despite their optimism about these opportunities, parents expressed skepticism about CAs' impoverished conversational abilities and worry about CAs advancing values and behavioral norms that are at odds with their own.

Learning Agent-based Modeling with LLM Companions: Experiences of Novices and Experts Using ChatGPT & NetLogo Chat

“…Two strands of user perception and behaviors studies informed our design and study: studies of conversational agents (CAs); and of LLM-based programming interfaces. For education, CAs were used to develop learners' writing [85], self-talk [29], and programming skills [95]. Many of them are pedagogical conversational agents (PCA) with the aim to adaptively mimic the behaviors of human tutors [96].…”

“…Many of them are pedagogical conversational agents (PCA) with the aim to adaptively mimic the behaviors of human tutors [96]. PCAs could serve in multiple roles, such as tutors [85], motivators [11], peer players [30], or learning companions [29].…”

Ascribing consciousness to artificial intelligence: human-AI interaction and its carry-over effects on human-human interaction

“…He thinks, as Google responds to such a tone, I would too.” While home assistants can negatively impact communication, they can also foster communication within families and alter how communication breakdowns are repaired ( Beneteau et al, 2019 , 2020 ). Parents have concerns about their children interacting with social actor AI, but they also see AI’s potential to support children by “attuning to others, cultivating curiosity, reinforcing politeness, and developing emotional awareness” ( Fu et al, 2022 ). According to the observational learning concept in Social Cognitive Theory ( Bandura, 1965 ), assistants might provide models for prosocial behavior that children could learn from (such as being polite, patient, and helpful) regardless of whether the assistant provides positive reinforcement when children act in these prosocial ways.…”