From Learning Companions to Testing Companions Experience with a Teachable Agent Motivates Students’ Performance on Summative Tests

"In the present work, we investigate how young students’ engagement and responsibility developed in relation to a TA [Teachable Agent] in a math learning game might be reestablished when the TA character is added to a digital, summative math test, without any kind of informative feedback. This represents an attempt to isolate the socio-motivational influence that the TA may carry simply by its presence from one situation (learning) to another (testing). Our main hypothesis was that students perform better on a test where their TA is present compared to a test where there is no TA, and that this might depend on students’ social relationship with their TA." (Authors, 460)