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When we combine these observations together, we conclude that a virtual peer tutor that can develop rapport with a student – or even engage in reciprocal peer tutoring (i.e.
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Furthermore, we know that when classroom peers collaborate on a learning project, those students who are friends collaborate more effectively than those students who are not friends. We know from research in the Learning Sciences that intelligent tutoring systems can help students learn, often vastly improving on learning in traditional, lecture-based classrooms.
#RAPT HOW TO#
As virtual agents and AI take on an increasingly important and ubiquitous role in our lives, we believe that these systems should know how to build rapport so as to better support their users over time. We all know that feeling of “getting along” or “clicking” with someone, and how that rapport builds as a relationship deepens, but there are few comprehensive theories about what that rapport-building process is and the mechanisms by which it takes place.Īnd yet, it has been shown that rapport plays an important role in everyday life: people learn more from teachers and peers with whom they feel rapport, have improved therapeutic benefits from therapists with whom they feel rapport, are more honest and more likely to complete surveys when they feel rapport with the interviewer, and so on. One of the most interesting, and least understood, fields of behavioral science involves the social substructure of daily life: friendship, politeness, impoliteness, relationship formation, and rapport. You can find a 1-page handout of this project here. We are currently running a study with 6th-8th grade students to evaluate the impact of this rapport-aware virtual tutor on students’ self-efficacy, motivation, engagement, and their Algebra knowledge. It then reasons about the most pedagogically and socially beneficial thing to say, and generates the most appropriate response to maximize students’ learning and the rapport between students and the virtual agent.
![rapt rapt](https://sdg-migration-id.s3.amazonaws.com/Interior-Design-Rapt_Google-39.jpg)
Our system models students’ knowledge as well as the rapport that develops between students and their virtual partner over time. We do this using cutting edge socially-aware artificial intelligence, developed in the ArticuLab at Carnegie Mellon University. To address this gap, we have developed the first “Rapport-Aware Virtual Peer Tutor” (RAPT). Intelligent tutoring systems, with their focus on the cognitive needs of students, often leave unaddressed the critical challenge of supporting the social relationships that are essential to learning. Learning is fundamentally a social endeavor, where the relationship that students build with their teachers and fellow learners can contribute to their motivation to learn and feelings of belonging, their persistence in the face of failure, and ultimately, improving their learning outcomes. However, decades of research on learning has demonstrated that learning is about more than simply providing the right exercises to students. To address this, “intelligent tutoring systems” have been developed which provide personalized, adaptive instruction and feedback for a variety of domains. In fact, often the students who most need individualized instruction are the least likely to receive it. Individual instruction from a private tutor has been shown to be the most effective form of learning, but, unfortunately, not every student has access to a private tutor. The RAPT project, or “ Rapport-Aware Virtual Peer Tutor ”, unlike most educational technologies, has developed a virtual partner that students can collaborate with, and which responds to, and can help foster, students’ socio-emotional awareness. In the 21st century, students’ future success now hinges on their socio-emotional skills, such as their ability to communicate and collaborate effectively.