Course Paper: Hi, chatbot can you help me to be more engaged?

A review of the effect of educational chatbot usage on students' engagement in learning activities in higher education.

---

This paper looks at the effect of text-based chatbot usage on students' engagement in learning activities in higher education. A multi-dimensional definition, including behavioral, cognitive, and affective indicators, has been used to achieve a holistic understanding of the effect.

A meta-analysis of five empirical articles from 2019 to 2023 showed, that student engagement is affected in terms of all three indicators - Cognitive engagement has been affected by higher self-organization and self-efficacy; behavioral engagement by doing more activities or looking for additional information and affective engagement has been affected in terms of a stronger emotional relationship with the chatbot and therefore a higher engagement in learning activities. The individual papers focused mostly on one aspect of engagement, however, the paper argues, that the different aspects correlate with each other and a holistic view of engagement is necessary.

KLEIN_SONJA_Course paper.pdf

Download PDF • 288KB

---

Personal takeaways

• Text-based educational chatbots influence students' engagement in terms of different aspects, depending on the chatbot and the individual goals of the learning activity.

Focus on the different scenarios of technology usage.

• There is a difference between the engagement with the chatbot and with the learning activity, although sometimes the chatbot is seen as the learning activity

Focus on what the engagement is aimed at.

• There is no right or wrong perspective to view an educational technology or definition of engagement. It always depends on the viewpoint and the theoretical background as well as the individual use case of the technology.

Reflect on which educational perspective is being used and why.