Improving Students’ Problem-Solving Skills with Smart Personal Assistants

Abstract

Tomorrow’s organizations need employees who are able to deal with rapid changes and solve non-routine problems. Gaining problem-solving skills is considered the number-one skill for future employees to succeed professionally. Predominant learning theories agree that the most effective way to gain these skills is for everyone to receive individual support by their own private tutor. For educational institutions such as high schools and universities, this is often not possible due to financial and organizational restrictions. A new emerging class of information technology – specifically Smart Personal Assistants (e.g., Google’s Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa) – has the potential to address this problem by interacting with students in a manner comparable to human tutors because of its high degree of adaptability, interactivity and accessibility. Even though there exists a growing body of research about the design and use of Smart Personal Assistants for learning, empirical evidence of their ability to help students improve their problem-solving skills is still scarce. Grounded on technology-mediated learning theory, this study uses a mixed-method approach consisting of two field quasi-experiments and one post-experiment focus group discussion at a business high school and a vocational business school with a total of 90 students to measure the effect of using Smart Personal Assistants on acquiring problem-solving skills. The empirical results show that students in the experiment classes acquired significantly more problemsolving skills than those in the control group mainly explained by changes in their learning process. The findings provide empirical evidence for the importance of using new emerging Smart Personal Assistants on general skill development, and specifically on problem-solving skill development. Moreover, our work can guide educational institutions and educators in designing and implementing Smart Personal Assistants in their own learning environments.

Keywords: Education, Field quasi-experiment, Intelligent tutoring system, Mixed-method, Problem-solving skills, Smart personal assistant, Technology-mediated learning