Investigating Conversational Agents to Support Secondary School Students Learning CSP
Matthew Frazier, Kostadin Damevski, Lori Pollock
TLDR
This paper investigates how conversational agents, both general-purpose and custom, can help secondary students learn AP Computer Science Principles.
Key contributions
- Investigates the potential of conversational agents to aid secondary students in learning CSP concepts.
- Compares general-purpose generative agents (e.g., ChatGPT) with custom fixed-response agents.
- Presents classroom study results from 45 high school students across six CSP sections.
- Evaluates the effectiveness and engagement of different CA approaches for CSP exploratory search.
Why it matters
This research addresses the challenge secondary students face in finding relevant learning resources for AP CSP. By evaluating different types of conversational agents, it provides insights into effective tools for supporting student learning and exploratory search in computer science.
Original Abstract
Secondary school students enrolled in the AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) course commonly utilize web resources (e.g., tutorials, Q\&A sites) to better understand key concepts in the curriculum. The primary obstacle to using these resources is finding information appropriate for the learning task and student's background. In addition to web search, conversational agents are increasingly a viable alternative for CSP students. In this paper, we study the potential of conversational agents to aid secondary school students as they acquire knowledge on CSP concepts. We explore general purpose, generative conversational agents (e.g., ChatGPT) and custom, fixed-response conversational agents built specifically to aid CSP students. We present results from classroom use by 45 high school students in grades 9-11 (ages 14-17) across six CSP sections. Our main contributions are in better understanding how conversational agents can help CSP students and an evaluation of the effectiveness and engagement of different approaches for CSP exploratory search.
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