Rediscovering the use of chatbots in education: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Chatbots have been around for years and have been used in many areas such as medicine or commerce. Our focus is on the development and current uses of chatbots in the field of education, where they can function as service assistants or as educational agents. In this research paper, we attempt to make a systematic review of the literature on educational chatbots that address various issues. From 485 sources, 80 studies on chatbots and their application in education were selected through a step-by-step procedure based on the guidelines of the PRISMA framework, using a set of predefined criteria. The results obtained demonstrate the existence of different types of educational chatbots currently in use that affect student learning or improve services in various areas. This paper also examines the type of technology used to unravel the learning outcome that can be obtained from each type of chatbots. Finally, our results identify instances where a chatbot can assist in learning under conditions similar to those of a human tutor, while exploring other possibilities and techniques for assessing the quality of chatbots. Our analysis details these findings and can provide a solid framework for research and development of chatbots for the educational field.

Are We There Yet? - A Systematic Literature Review on Chatbots in Education

“…Regarding the applications of chatbots (CAT1), application clusters (AC) and application statistics (AS) have been described in the literature, which we visualized in Figure 1. The study of (Pérez et al, 2020) identifies two application clusters, defined through chatbot activities: "service-oriented chatbots" and "teaching-oriented chatbots." (Winkler and Soellner, 2018) identify applications clusters by naming the domains "health and well-being interventions," "language learning," "feedback and metacognitive thinking" as well as "motivation and selfefficacy."…”

“…Furthermore, a comparison of speech and text interfaces (Jung et al, 2020) shows that text interfaces have advantages for conveying information, and speech interfaces have advantages for affective support. The second aspect of CAT2 concerns the chatbot processing pipeline (PP), highlighting user interface and back-end importance (Pérez et al, 2020). Finally, (Jung et al, 2020) focuses on the third aspect, the personality of chatbots (PS).…”

“…The first and most important in the educational field, according to (Smutny and Schreiberova, 2020) is the evaluation of learning success (Hobert, 2019a), which can have subcategories such as how chatbots are embedded in learning scenarios (Winkler and Soellner, 2018;Smutny and Schreiberova, 2020) and teaching efficiency (Pérez et al, 2020). The second is acceptance, which (Hobert, 2019a) names as "acceptance and adoption" and (Pérez et al, 2020) as "students' perception." Further evaluation criteria are motivation, usability, technical correctness, psychological, and further beneficial factors (Hobert, 2019a).…”

“…Regarding educational effects of chatbots (CAT4), we found two aspects visualized in Figure 4: Effect Size (ES) and Beneficial Chatbot Features for Learning Success (BF). Concerning the effect size, (Pérez et al, 2020) identified a strong dependency between learning and the related curriculum, while (Winkler and Soellner, 2018) elaborate on general student characteristics that influence how students interact with chatbots. They state that students' attitudes towards technology, learning characteristics, educational background, self-efficacy, and self-regulation skills affect these interactions.…”

“…For this reason, they have also been proposed and researched for a variety of applications in education (Winkler and Soellner, 2018). Recent literature reviews on chatbots in education (Winkler and Soellner, 2018;Hobert, 2019a;Hobert and Meyer von Wolff, 2019;Jung et al, 2020;Pérez et al, 2020;Smutny and Schreiberova, 2020;Pérez-Marín, 2021) have reported on such applications as well as design guidelines, evaluation possibilities, and effects of chatbots in education.…”