While educational psychology is increasingly documenting the learning benefits of social interactions, online curricula may be increasing the time students spend working alone. Here, we discuss a curriculum module that uses a collaborative chat application to bring social interactions online in a scalable manner. This module covers intermolecular forces using the well-known jigsaw instructional approach. Each student is trained in either dispersion, polar, or ionic intermolecular forces and then assigned to a chat room. Each room includes one student from each training group and an intelligent computer agent that poses questions, listens for participant agreement on a response, and then posts an answer with explanations. The agent also facilitates discussion both generally, e.g. prompting quiet students to summarize, and by revoicing student comments that match a list of expert explanations. In addition to providing details on system implementation, this talk will present notable results and chat transcript excerpts.

2. Motivation
• Benefits of social interactions in learning
– Question
– Answer
– Discuss
• Increasing amount of online curriculum
– Students learn in isolation
– No opportunities to question, answer, discuss
• How to resolve this situation?

3. Approach: Put Interactions Online
• Online chat
• Involve whole class
– One room is too full
• Many simultaneous chat rooms
• How to stay on-topic?
– Structured content
– Multiple human facilitators
– Computer agent facilitator

5. Quinn’s interactions
• Social
– Ask quiet students for input
– Ask inactive students to summarize discussion
• Revoicing
– Read student response
– Compare response to list of expert responses
– “Revoice” student response if good match is found
– “Oh, do you mean ‘Boiling point increases with
increasingly strong intermolecular forces’

6. Pilot Study
• Goals
– Teach intermolecular forces using real data
– Determine relative effect of treatment
• Social Agent
• Revoicing Agent
• Human Expert
• Context
– Honors Chem 1 at R1 university
– N = 31

7. Study Design
Test A Test B
Day 1
Non-polar Training Polar Training Ionic Training
Time
Self-efficacy Questionnaire
Day 2
Chat Room (Social) Chat Room (Revoice) Chat Room (Human)
Test B + Self-efficacy Questionnaire Test A + Self-efficacy Questionnaire

8. Boiling Point vs van der Waals Area for Linear and Branched Alkanes
500
450 Decane
Nonane
400 Octane
Heptane
350 Hexane
Boiling Point (K)
300 Pentane
Butane
250
Propane
200 Unbranched
Ethane
150 Branched
Methane
100
50
0
0.000E+00 5.000E+09 1.000E+10 1.500E+10
van der Waals Area (cm2/mol)

9. Activity
• Introduction
– 3 datasets, one for each training group
• Boiling Point Estimation (6)
Higher than both
Substance A (Boiling Point: Given)
Boiling Point
Substance C (Boiling Point: Unknown)
? In Between
Substance B (Boiling Point: Given)
Lower than both

10. Activity
• Ordering a set of molecules
– Progressive substitution:
• methane, fluoromethane, difluoromethane, etc.
– Does each substitution raise or lower:
• van der Waals Area
• dipole moment
• boiling point
– Repeat for chlorine & bromine substitutions

11. Results
243 F11017 where is she actually?
244 F11017 at her home??
245 F11017 or here?
246 F11017 can we see her physcially?
247 F11021 she's a computer
248 F11017 really?????
i do not know if it is a comp
249 F11005
program or not
250 F11017 I thought you were joking!
251 F11021 it definitely is
252 F11017 oh my!!!
253 F11005
254 F11017 that shocked me!
255 F11017 but she talked like a person
256 F11005 Quinn?
257 F11005 Quinn
258 F11017 that's awesome

12. Results
so wait...what exactly are the factors that influence the boiling
42 F11021
point then?
I think the bigger intremolecular force is the higher the boiling
43 F11017
point is
Are you saying "the larger the sum of all intermolecular forces, the
44 Quinn
higher the boiling point"?
122 F11015 k is it just larger dipole means larger force?
Another way to say that might be "larger dipole moments lead to
123 Quinn
larger dipole-dipole forces."
124 F11015 thanks quinn!!!!!!!!!
125 F11012 how the (bleep) did he know that

13. Results
Another way to say that might be "a highly symmetric electron
185 Quinn
distribution produces a dipole moment of zero."
the molecule can be completely symetrical and that would end up
186 F11012
in a net dipole of 0
F11002 - how about you provide a recap of what the group's been
187 Quinn
discussing.
188 F11012 shut up quinn im doing this
how about you leave me up to my own devices instead of wasting
189 F11002 my time. Yes, I know that you are innanimate and that you have no
soul; however, I still would like to believe that I can hurt you a bit

14. Results
• Pilot Study
– Bad news:
• Small N
– no significant difference between treatment groups
• Technical glitches
– Good news:
• Improved pre-post performance
– Including “untrained” interactions
• Technical glitches are resolved

15. Discussion
• Other studies
– 9th grade biology study (N = 78)
• Revoicing group provided better explanations with
more science content
• Method is content-agnostic
– Used with biology, engineering
• Method works with variety of ages

16. Future Work
• Large-scale study in Fall 2012
– N = ~350
• Exploring Moodle integration