Empowering K-12 Students to Understand and Design Conversational Agents: Concepts, Recommendations and Development Platforms

Abstract

Conversation influences nearly every aspect of human life, and has done so for ages. Recently, people have begun to converse with technology. This method of technology interaction has rapidly become prominent, and raises unique questions about human-computer interaction. For instance, how do such human-like, relational interactions affect people’s trust of computer systems? Researchers have started to investigate such questions with respect to adults, finding correlations between trust and anthropomorphism of agents. However, very little research investigates children’s perceptions of these devices, and even less investigates how interventions might change these perceptions. This is despite how educational interventions have previously changed how people perceive and trust other technology. It is also despite how conversational technology is uniquely positioned to appeal to children, influence them relationally and potentially spread misinformation.

This dissertation presents educational interventions for K-12 students, which aim to encourage healthier understanding and relationships with conversational agents. This includes conversational agent curricula, development platforms and conceptual frameworks. Through studies with children and parents from Western, Industrialized, Educated, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) and non-WEIRD countries, I found different subsets of the participants’ perceptions of agents changed differently through the activities. For instance, after learning to program agents, participants from non-WEIRD countries felt agents were more competent, more dependable and more like authority figures than those from WEIRD countries did. Children consistently felt agents were warmer and more humanlike than parents did. When participants discussed their trust of agents, I found they frequently mentioned where agents obtained their information, what agents do with the information they are given and how agents are programmed. I also found participants most often mentioned learning something when discussing why their trust changed.

These studies, as well as a systematic literature review and an analysis of various agent development platforms, informed the creation of a pedagogical framework of forty foundational conversational agent concepts, seventeen conversational agent design recommendations and thirteen conversational agent K-12 pedagogy recommendations. For instance, I recommend designing agents with more task-orientation in general, while considering the end user audience. I also recommend informing end users about the trustworthiness of agents through agent design and educational interventions. This is to increase transparency and allow end users to calibrate their trust accordingly. Educators may increase agent transparency through teaching the foundational agent concepts in the framework, which fall under the categories of natural language understanding; conversation representation; dialog management; data access and conversation context; and human-agent interaction. With conversational agents becoming increasingly ubiquitous, it is increasingly important for users of this technology—including and especially children—to be able to calibrate healthy perceptions and levels of trust towards it. This research aims to empower children to do this through a conversational agent design and pedagogy framework.