Conversational teachable agents offer a promising platform to support learning, both in the classroom and in remote settings. In this context, the agent takes the role of the novice, while the student takes on the role of teacher. This framing is significant for its ability to elicit the Prot\'eg\'e effect in the student-teacher, a pedagogical phenomenon known to increase engagement in the teaching task, and also improve cognitive outcomes. In prior work, teachable agents often take a passive role in the learning interaction, and there are few studies in which the agent and student engage in natural language dialogue during the teaching task. This work investigates the effect of teaching modality when interacting with a virtual agent, via the web-based teaching platform, the Curiosity Notebook. A method of teaching the agent by selecting sentences from source material is compared to a method paraphrasing the source material and typing text input to teach. A user study has been conducted to measure the effect teaching modality on the learning outcomes and engagement of the participants. The results indicate that teaching via paraphrasing and text input has a positive effect on learning outcomes for the material covered, and also on aspects of affective engagement. Furthermore, increased paraphrasing effort, as measured by the similarity between the source material and the material the teacher conveyed to the robot, improves learning outcomes for participants.

该文章研究了在与虚拟教学代理交互时教学模态的影响，比较了从教材中选择句子和从教材中转述并键入文本输入的方法。研究表明，通过转述和文本输入进行教学对所学习到的知识和心态参与方面的提高具有积极的影响，并且转述相似程度的提高还可以改善参与者的学习成果。

可教授智能体的自然语言交流