Agent prompts: Scaffolding students for productive reflection in an intelligent learning environment

Recent research has emphasized the importance of reflection for students in an intelligent learning environment. This study tries to investigate whether agent prompts, acting as scaffolding, can promote students' reflection when they act as tutor through teaching the agent tutee in a learning-by-teaching environment. Two types of agent prompts are contrasted in this research, both from the perspective of a tutee, differing in their specificity. Reflective prompts are content-independent tutee questions, aiming at fostering students' general reflection on metacognitive strategies and beliefs. Interactive prompts, on the other hand, are content-dependent tutee questions that encourage students' specific reflection on domain-related and task-specific skills and articulation of their explanatory responses. The result indicates that designers on intelligent learning environment should concentrate on fostering students to reflect on their metacognitive strategies and beliefs, and allow students to take responsibility for directing their own learning autonomy. Copyright © 2010 Springer-Verlag.