Influence of Social Communication Skills on Collaborative Learning with a Pedagogical Agent: Investigation Based on the Autism-spectrum Quotient

Studies in collaborative learning show that learners with fewer social interaction skills have difficulty during collaborative activities with others. The present study investigates how such a learner's skills influence the performance of an online concept-learning tutoring task with a Pedagogical Conversational Agent (PCA). During the task, the learners were guided by a PCA that helped them formulate their explanations of a key concept taught in a large-scale class. The study assesses the degree of learner's social skills based on the autism spectrum quotient (AQ) and investigates how this level skills influences learning with the PCA. Results show that learners with higher social skills performed better on explanation activities with the PCA. This shows that social cognitive skills influence learning performance during communication-based learning support systems. The results of this study suggest that there is a need to design efficient online tutoring systems that consider a learner's social skills.