Abstract:

Apart from providing best teaching facilities, student motivation is needed to learn and excel in their studies and to bring out better learning outcomes. Motivation is the driving force that is needed to do any activity. Ryan and Deci [1] state that intrinsic motivation i.e. the internal drive or curiosity to do an activity brings better learning outcomes among students, while extrinsic motivation factors like rewards and grades only motivate students for a short time.

Our research work focuses on Flipped Classroom (FC) scenarios. In these settings, there is the promise of self-paced learning during preparation on one hand, coupled with the worry about student’s motivation to perform that preparation – it is known that it is often low [2]. We hence investigate the research question, “Can chatbot be used to build intrinsic motivation in students for preparation in flipped classroom scenarios?”. Our research work follows design science methodology. It identifies and analyzes the Intrinsic Motivation Building Factors (IMBF) from the literature review. For that we refer to motivation theories like Self Determination Theory (SDT). SDT suggests that intrinsic motivation can be built by supporting students’ emotional needs of autonomy, relatedness and competency [3]. We analyze, how the IMBF influence the learning behavior in a FC. In a FC, the students prepare outside of class while the in-class time is spent in group discussions, problem solving, hands on activities under the guidance of the tutor. However, with this method, the load of preparation increases outside class. When students prepare at home, teachers have less influence over them. In a recent anonymous survey at FHNW, School of Business revealed that only 27.7% students often prepared while only 7% always prepared before a FC. The reasons for not preparing are lack of motivation, interest and time; high workload; no clarity of what to prepare. We mapped these findings with the emotional needs of SDT. We analyzed how these IMBF can be supported by chatbots. Chatbots are being used effectively for language learning and have the capacity to engage students in different educational activities and tasks [4], [5].We then incorporated these IMBF into guidelines which help to build intrinsically motivating student-chatbot dialogue scenarios in FC. Such student-chatbot dialogue scenarios are also presented in the paper.

References:
[1] R. M. Ryan and E. L. Deci, “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions,” Contemporary Educational Psychology, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 54–67, Jan. 2000.
[2] L. Abeysekera and P. Dawson, “Motivation and Cognitive Load in the Flipped Classroom: Definition, Rationale and a Call for Research.,” 2015.
[3] K. F. Trenshaw, R. A. Revelo, K. A. Earl, and G. L. Herman, “Using Self Determination Theory Principles to Promote Engineering Students’ Intrinsic Motivation to Learn,” International Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 32, no. No. 3(A), pp. 1194–1207, 2016.
[4] L. Benotti, M. C. Martínez, and F. Schapachnik, “Engaging high school students using chatbots,” in Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education - ITiCSE ’14, New York, New York, USA, 2014, pp. 63–68.
[5] L. Fryer, “Bots as Language Learning Tools,” Language, Learning and Technology, vol. 10, 2006.

Keywords:

Chatbot, flipped classroom, Self-Determination Theory, intrinsic motivation.