The interrelationship between concepts about agency and students’ use of teachable-agent learning technology

To successfully interact with software agents, people must call upon basic concepts about goals and intentionality and strategically deploy these concepts in a range of circumstances where specific entailments may or may not apply. We hypothesize that people who can effectively deploy agency concepts in new situations will be more effective in interactions with software agents. Further, we posit that interacting with a software agent can itself refine a person’s deployment of agency concepts. We investigated this reciprocal relationship in one particularly important context: the classroom. In three experiments we examined connections between middle school students’ concepts about agency and their success learning from a teachable-agent-based computer system called “Betty’s Brain”. We found that the students who made more intentional behavioral predictions about humans learned more effectively from the system. We also found that students who used the Betty’s Brain system distinguished human behavior from machine behavior more strongly than students who did not. We conclude that the ability to effectively deploy agency concepts both supports, and is refined by, interactions with software agents.