The goal of the Atlas project has been to provide opportunities for students to construct their own knowledge and to learn actively by conversing with a natural language-based ITS. We report the results of an evaluation comparing student learning of basic qualitative physics concepts when they engage in natural language dialog, specifically in Knowledge Construction Dialogs (KCDs), with student learning when they simply read about the physics concepts in mini-lessons. A 2-tailed paired t-test computed over all matched pairs in our student population demonstrates a trend in favor of KCDs with students who had no previous college level physics courses.
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