On April 27, the Department of Educational Psychology held its fourth and final colloquium of the 2015-2016 school year. Dr. Art Graesser, a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute of Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis and is a senior research fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford, presented on his research in : cognitive science, discourse processing, artificial procedures, text comprehension, human and computer tutoring, design of educational software, and human-computer interaction. Specifically, Dr. Graesser discussed intelligent systems, conversational trialogues, the Center for Study of Adult Literacy, and PAL3.

Dr. Graesser shared  his work with AutoTutor. This intelligent learning system holds conversations with humans  in their natural language. This form of one-on-one instruction was created to inspire tutoring strategies, pedagogical agents, and technology that supports learning in the natural language.

He also addressed the conversational trialgoues and the conversational agents which must be considered when designing intelligent learning systems. Some key points Dr. Graesser  discussed included the implementation of 20 universal conversational patterns, staging arguments to prompt deeper learning and modeling action, and thought and social interaction.

Finally, Dr. Graesser explained how intelligent pedagogical agents help students learn by holding a conversation in their natural language.  Dr. Graesser and his colleagues have developed and tested many of these agent-based learning environments for nearly two decades. When designed well, these agents are sensitive to the learners’ emotions,  subject matter knowledge, and other psychological attributes.

The Educational Psychology colloquium series is funded in part by the Yackel Endowment.