Shifting the Load: a Peer Dialogue Agent that Encourages its Human Collaborator to Contribute More to Problem Solving

It is found that students do learn when interacting with the agent and that attempting to influence initiative taking did make a difference, suggesting that by tracking initiative shifts, the agent was able to detect times when the student had been letting the agent do most of the “deep thinking” and that the agent’s tactics for encouraging the student to begin taking the initiative again were helpful.