January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

prompted to consider how their beliefs, experiences and knowledge have shaped the theories they apply to teaching
and learning. Working from awareness and understanding of their own metacognitive strategies and beliefs, student
teachers can then be challenged to consider a wider range of discourses, an aspect that Phelan (2001) argues is vital
in recognizing the discourses that shape and often restrict thinking. From our study, it could be possible to conclude
that the focus for reflection on metacognitive strategies and beliefs could shape or restrict students’ reflection during
the reflective practices.
A similar study is conducted by Andre (1979) who investigates the effects of asking students questions at different
levels of cognitive complexity during learning. It is shown that higher level questions can have facilitative effects on
both reproductive and productive knowledge, but the conditions under which such facilitation occurs are not well
understood. A more recent study by Chen et al. (2009) finds that the main factor affecting reflection levels is high
level prompts followed by high quality observation that has a moderating effect on learners' reflection levels.
Conclusion
Overall, the results of the study suggest that the use of agent tutee as an active and inquisitive learning partner to ask
meaningful questions could be some helpful to students learn by reflective teaching. The preliminary quantitative
and qualitative results suggest that the use of an agent prompts as computer-based scaffolds, could be useful in
particular ways, such as improving students’ learning outcomes and eliciting higher levels of reflection.
The study suggests that generic prompts could be more beneficial in fostering double-loop learning. There remains
significant support challenges that must be overcome before a system similar to that used in this study, with agent
prompts, can be incorporated into regular classroom use. Generally, the goal of supporting students needs to shift
from a notion of leading to one of facilitating and enabling. This means designing intelligent tutee systems that are
not necessarily recipients of information but, rather, they are designed to promote reflection. Instead of attempting to
create an agent tutee that will always know the correct answer, designers need to design agent tutee systems that
encourage students to do both reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action (Schön, 1987) and pay attention to
double-loop reflection (Argyris and Schön, 1974, 1978, 1996), i.e., thinking out of the box.
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Gautam Biswas in Vanderbilt for providing the Teachable Agent software.
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