Development of an Educational Chatbot System for Enhancing Students’ Biology Learning Performance

Abstract

In traditional biology classrooms, teachers do not have enough class time to interact with students, and students often do not have the opportunities to raise questions in class. Therefore, out of class, students may not have sufficient ability to learn and review biology knowledge based on faulty foundations. To address the problem, it is important to provide suitable learning tools to support students conducting biology learning out of class. In recent years, chatbots have been adopted in various fields for providing instant interactions and supports to users. Therefore, by using chatbot technologies in biology education, students can interact with a chatbot out of class anytime and anywhere and further obtain instant learning supports. Bearing this in mind, the aim of this study is to propose a biology learning chatbot system that can support students to learn biology out of class. Moreover, a quasi-experiment was designed for a grade 7 biology course in a junior high school. 34 students were asked to participate in the experiment and divided into a control group and an experimental group. The experimental results indicated that the proposed chatbot system had a positive impact on students' learning achievements in traditional biology learning.