Developing an LLM-Empowered Agent to Enhance Student Collaborative Learning Through Group Discussion

Abstract

Aiming at improving collaborative learning, the current study builds and tests an LLM-empowered agent to enhance student engagement in group discussion. We introduce a four-module conversational system, providing a user-friendly chat website integrated with an LLM agent, where students can discuss on and learn a specific topic in an online classroom. The LLM agent can continuously monitor the dialogue process and give constructive and reflective responses as a knowledgeable learning peer to engage students in the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. To evaluate the pedagogical performance of the system, three LLMs were tested by prompting. The results showed that LLMs with only prompting were unable to accurately process multi-user dialogue information and lacked pedagogical strategies in their responses.