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Can Automated Emotional Scaffolding Affect Student Persistence? A Baseline Experiment

Jack Mostow, Joseph E. Beck, and J. Valeri
Proceedings of the Workshop on "Assessing and Adapting to User Attitudes and Affect: Why, When and How?" at the 9th International Conference on User Modeling (UM'03), June, 2003, pp. 61 - 64.


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Abstract
A 2002 Wizard of Oz study showed that emotional scaffolding provided by a human significantly increased children's persistence in an automated Reading Tutor, as measured by the number of tasks they chose to undertake. We report a 5,965-trial experiment to test a simple automated form of such scaffolding, compared to a control condition without it. 348 children in grades K-4 spent significantly longer per task in the experimental condition due to a design flaw, yet still averaged equal numbers of tasks in both conditions. We theorize that they subjectively gauged effort in terms of number of tasks rather than number or duration of solution attempts.

Notes
Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Project LISTEN
Associated Project(s): Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor
Number of pages: 4

Text Reference
Jack Mostow, Joseph E. Beck, and J. Valeri, "Can Automated Emotional Scaffolding Affect Student Persistence? A Baseline Experiment," Proceedings of the Workshop on "Assessing and Adapting to User Attitudes and Affect: Why, When and How?" at the 9th International Conference on User Modeling (UM'03), June, 2003, pp. 61 - 64.

BibTeX Reference
@inproceedings{Mostow_2003_4659,
   author = "Jack Mostow and Joseph E Beck and J. Valeri",
   title = "Can Automated Emotional Scaffolding Affect Student Persistence? A Baseline Experiment",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the Workshop on "Assessing and Adapting to User Attitudes and Affect: Why, When and How?" at the 9th International Conference on User Modeling (UM'03)",
   pages = "61 - 64",
   month = "June",
   year = "2003",
}

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