Chatbots in education : exploring the effects of an educational chatbot on learning behavior and outcome in a commercial high school context

Chatbots represent a very popular technology today, especially in organizations as well as in the people’s private life. The usage in organization is mainly concentrated on customer support, where the chatbot responds questions of the users. Also booking a flight or direct customers to the right products are common tasks a chatbot does for people. However, chatbots can have many different applications, not only in organizations. In this study, the usage of chatbots in the educational sector will be investigated. Until now, this field is relatively unexplored, especially when the focus lies on the information distribution to the students. In the literature, there is hardly anything researched about how and if a chatbot is able to transmit information to students. Therefore, this master thesis is focused on this topic. This study in-vestigated with help of an experiment whether a chatbot influences the learning behavior and the learning outcome of students in contrast to the traditional teaching materials. For that purpose, an experiment with two experimental rounds was conducted. The chatbot got equipped with a theory repetition function as well as quiz function which can be used in order to prepare for the test that will be conducted after the learning procedure. Moreover, the students received a pre- and a post-survey about different fields of interest concerning the topic chatbots. With help of the experiment it was visible that students were able to achieve a better result in the test when they prepared the topics with help of the chatbot. Moreover, the moti-vation was influenced positively when preparing with the chatbot. The results of this experiment delivered first insights in this until now relatively unexplored field of research and how and if chatbots can contribute to the learning process and learning success.
Sarah Waldner
Masterarbeit Universität Innsbruck 2019