Animal Companion Approach to Fostering Students' Effort-Making Behaviors

The effort-making behavior is significant for learning, since it involves beliefs students hold within. In this paper, an animal companion approach is proposed to foster students' such learning behaviors through nurturing virtual pets, in which learning tasks are regarded as “work” and the value of effort is cultivated. In addition, inspecting open learner models is also encouraged by interacting with animal companions, which might be helpful to students' self-awareness for their efforts made.