A simulated student agent for improving collaborative learning

The implementation of collaborative systems in learning situations frequently suffers from an emphasis on technical issues, which often leads to a neglect of the problems encountered when learners have to solve tasks jointly. This paper describes how a Simulated Student may be used in synchronous collaborative applications with the goal of monitoring students’ actions in order to detect and correct specific types of disfunctioning in collaboration. Several experiments were carried out with the intention of testing whether the Simulated Student was useful. Data showed that in the majority of the cases the Simulated Student detected and avoided “negative situations” and, what is more, it also improved students’ learning.