CHS: Small: Designing verbal and nonverbal behaviors to increase immediacy and rapport in virtual tutors

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Charisma is an effective form of communication and a powerful device of persuasion. In classrooms, teachers use charismatic devices to inspire students and help them learn. A teacher's verbal behavior (such as the use of humor) and nonverbal behavior (such as the use of gaze, gesture, and facial expressions) have consistently demonstrated a positive impact on students' cognitive and affective learning. In fact, a teacher's charisma, often studied in the context of immediacy behaviors in an educational context, is one of the biggest factors contributing to a teacher's efficacy. For the future workforce, learning is increasingly taking place in virtual and online classrooms, such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Being able to bring such charismatic behaviors to virtual tutors in online environments could greatly increase student learning. To that end, this project will investigate the design of such charismatic behaviors and will measure the efficacy of a charismatic virtual tutor in fostering student motivation and engagement and in improving learning outcomes. In addition to its applications to virtual and online education, the charismatic behavior studied through this project can be applied to many applications where technology provides devices of persuasion, including negotiation and health.This project addresses the important issue of how to realize immediacy, one of the biggest factors contributing to teacher efficacy, in online and virtual environments. The team will break down charismatic behavior into both verbal and nonverbal communication devices that can be executed by virtual agents. These devices will then be evaluated and implemented in virtual agents through a number of activities. First, the team will develop scripted tutorial dialogue for a virtual tutor based on existing literature on charisma and teacher immediacy. State-of-the-art speech synthesis will then be used to develop a charismatic voice for the virtual tutor. Finally, a suite of procedural animation tools, such as Smartbody and Cerebella, will be used to generate nonverbal gestures that contribute to perceived charisma. The project will take the approach of iterative design, with behavior generated at each phase empirically evaluated on its impact on perceived charisma and student learners and used to inform the design of agent behaviors in the next phase.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.