Designing Conversational Agents to Support Student Teacher Learning in Virtual Reality Simulation: A Case Study.

Maximizing educational impacts with learning technologies is one of the areas that researchers and practitioners are concerned about in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI). In this case study, we report user experiences and lessons learned of the Enactive Virtual Environment for teaching practice (EVETeach) with AI-powered virtual student agents called Evelyn. We conducted a user study with a case study research design. We collected multiple sources of data from 24 student teachers, including participatory observations, field notes, semi-structured interviews, computer-based conversation logs, audio-, video-, and screen-recordings, and a cognitive walkthrough. We identified the following salient emerging findings as lessons learned: 1) Student teachers value and relate to the teaching practices in virtual reality simulation with AI-powered conversational agents, 2) AI-powered conversational agents inject humor to facilitate situational and social teaching practice, and 3) AI-powered conversational student agents maintain authentic discourse to promote student teachers’ pedagogical reasoning.