Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Imagine a software agent that learns how to develop personalized education and training strategies for you based on your own habits and strengths, and based on the learning analytics patterns of thousands of other successful students that have come before. A trusted friend, partner, and ally that can help identify goals, and map out the most likely path to achieve those goals, based on your own learning styles, consistent with your own deepest values, personal, social, and other standards. This research aims to build and test a suite of such intelligent agents, called anthropomorphic agents, that mimic human-like traits and will assist learners in their regulatory tasks. Further these agents self-regulate their own anthropomorphic traits, such as initiative and subject matter competency, in order to inspire a high level of trust, shared perspective, and entitativity - thus increasing the learners' willingness to view them as competent partners in the educational process.Research shows that motivational strategies through mixed-initiatives can be used to scaffold students'emotional, cognitive, and competence experiences so as to increase the success of regulation. This is accomplished by circumventing unproductive mental states and/or maintaining states that are more conducive for carrying out regulation tasks. Other mediative acts include assistance with goal formulation and identifying strengths and weaknesses, data-mining to evaluate goal-progress as well as selection of optimal strategies and plans for adaptation proffered in a preferred format and manner most likely to inspire the required changes and adjustments. Current theories of regulation do not model the impact of anthropomorphic agents. The results of this research will provide new information that fills this gap in the existing body of knowledge. There are real reasons that prevent people from enjoying the benefits of regulation that include low working memory capacity, stress or depletion of regulatory resources, disorders of executive function (e.g., ADHD), poor time management skills, personality and temperament, which can be effectively addressed with anthropomorphic software agents.