Ambient Conversation Support in Small Face-to-Face Group Meetings

Learner-centered learning methods have been considered for school education settings to help improve problem-solving skills of learners. Collaborative learning (CL), an approach in which two or more participants attempt to solve a problem together, has proven to be effective. Ambient support, which does not interrupt face-to-face interaction, is necessary in computer-supported collaborative learning or computer-supported cooperative work. Particular displays for such support are used in numerous recently released support systems. Much information, such as the number of utterances of learners and the degree of contribution to a discussion during the learning process, is represented on the displays by these systems; however, such support is not ambient because some participating learners watched the displays instead of focusing on other learners. In addition, support content for each learner is broadcast by these systems. According to research results, such broadcasting displeases some students; therefore, such support is not appropriate. In our research, we have aimed to develop an ambient conversation support system (ACSS) to solve these problems. First, we compared support methods of recently released systems (i.e., public conditions) with our developed approach (i.e., private conditions). Our experimental results indicate that (1) the average speech time per utterance under private conditions was statistically shorter than that of public conditions and (2) this average speech time per utterance under public conditions was statistically shorter than that of conditions in which participants were not supported by an ACSS (i.e., the no-support conditions). Experimental results and our discussion suggest that (1) the ACSS had a positive effect in support of increasing the number of participant utterances and (2) private conditions might pressure each participant against our expectations.