Virtual teachers outperform real thing

By Robin Lloyd

updated 1:19 p.m. ET Feb. 21, 2008

BOSTON - Never let schooling get in the way of your education, Mark Twain supposedly said, and the latest advances in psychology and behavior science take that to a new dimension — virtual reality and the digital domain.

Virtual characters and digital tutors are helping children and adults develop advanced social and language skills that can be tough to learn via conventional approaches, according to researchers who briefed reporters here last week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Justine Cassell of Northwestern University has found that children with autism can develop advanced social skills by interacting with a "virtual child" that they might not develop by hanging out with real children or teachers. Cassell is credited with developing the Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA), a virtual human capable of interacting with humans using language and gestures.

Her "virtual child" is a cartoon about the size of an 8-year-old with whom kids can learn and play on the floor with toys via a plasma screen projection. The cartoon looks like a boy to boys and like a girl to girl, and is racially ambiguous, so no one feels left out.

The language skills of children who played with the virtual child improved and their social-interaction skills improved, Cassell's research shows. "They played nicer," doing better at taking turns, she said.

The virtual child has been tested and found to be an effective way to teach autistic children the ability to stay on topic in conversations, take turns to talk and nod when spoken to, she said.

‘Baldi’ teaches language
Along similar lines, Dominic W. Massaro of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has developed software that presents 3-D animated "tutors" or talking heads that are useful in teaching remedial readers, children with language challenges and anyone learning a second language. His teachers are less cartoonish than Cassell's, and the focus is on speech accuracy.

One of the tutors (or embodied agents) developed by Massaro, "Baldi," has been used at the Defense Language Institute in California to teach foreign languages to Americans doing military and other work in Iraq. A handful of public schools in California and Florida have adopted the software to help children learn skills, he said.

Baldi can be programmed to enhance "error-free learning" such that the tutor doesn't say, "That's wrong," when students make mistakes, but instead offers informative feedback that helps students see their error and do better with their next chance to answer a question.

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