Real-Time Affective Support to Promote Learner’s Engagement

Research has shown that the learning processes can be enriched and enhanced with the presence of affective interventions. The goal of this dissertation was to design, implement, and evaluate an affective agent that provides affective support in real-time in order to enrich the student’s learning experience and performance by inducing and/or maintaining a productive learning path. This work combined research and best practices from affective computing, intelligent tutoring systems, and educational technology to address the design and implementation of an affective agent and corresponding pedagogical interventions. It included the incorporation of the affective agent into an Exploratory Learning Environment (ELE) adapted for this research.

A gendered, three-dimensional, animated, human-like character accompanied by text- and speech-based dialogue visually represented the proposed affective agent. The agent’s pedagogical interventions considered inputs from the ELE (interface, model building, and performance events) and from the user (emotional and cognitive events). The user’s emotional events captured by biometric sensors and processed by a decision-level fusion algorithm for a multimodal system in combination with the events from the ELE informed the production-rule-based behavior engine to define and trigger pedagogical interventions. The pedagogical interventions were focused on affective dimensions and occurred in the form of affective dialogue prompts and animations.

An experiment was conducted to assess the impact of the affective agent, Hope, on the student’s learning experience and performance. In terms of the student’s learning experience, the effect of the agent was analyzed in four components: perception of the instructional material, perception of the usefulness of the agent, ELE usability, and the affective responses from the agent triggered by the student’s affective states.

Additionally, in terms of the student’s performance, the effect of the agent was analyzed in five components: tasks completed, time spent solving a task, planning time while solving a task, usage of the provided help, and attempts to successfully complete a task. The findings from the experiment did not provide the anticipated results related to the effect of the agent; however, the results provided insights to improve diverse components in the design of affective agents as well as for the design of the behavior engines and algorithms to detect, represent, and handle affective information.